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If you can find where to stream this this would be a great episode to watch

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Martha and Ash are a happy couple living together. Ash is unexpectedly killed in a car accident. Martha's friend signs her up for a beta service that uses Ash's public information to create an AI. Martha finds out she's pregnant and begins texting the AI. She uploads videos of Ash, allowing the AI to speak to her. She then brings him back to life by ordering an artificial body.

At first Martha is skeptical of the service because it's impossible to bring the real Ash back. She finds comfort in hearing his voice and decides to take the next step. She's speechless when she sees how real the AI body looks and feels. The subtle differences the AI has compared to Ash make Martha consider abandoning the AI for good.

Hayley Atwell gives a great performance, showing the painful struggles of a grieving woman and the positive and negative impacts of artificial intelligence. She portrays a whirlwind of emotions that she eventually learns to live with.

The future of AI is upon us and this episode depicts a realistic view of the future, pushing the boundaries of AI one step at a time. Black Mirror has a fascinating way of making me believe this futuristic technology isn't that far away from becoming reality.

8/10

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"Black Mirror" Be Right Back (TV Episode 2013) - IMDb

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Be Right Back: Directed by Owen Harris. With Hayley Atwell, Domhnall Gleeson, Claire Keelan, Sinead Matthews. After learning about a new service that lets people stay in touch with the deceased, a lonely, grieving Martha reconnects with her late lover.

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Ever imagined what Soviet Afrofuturism looks like? Me neither, but you don't have to imagine: DALL·E 2 has done it for you (see below). The digital visual landscape has been changed in a matter of months by three text-to-image AI image generators: DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Others such as Nightcafe are also gaining in popularity. In essence, these allow those with access to generate totally new images, based on human inputted natural language prompts.

The results have been startling: the generating models can instantly create novel photorealistic images that accurately follow complex optical phenomena or mimic idiosyncratic artistic styles. They can genre-mix, time travel and predict the future in a manner that suggests a boundless, wild imagination. Remarkably, some of these image generators are open source: anyone can access DALL·E 2 for free, plugging in their own absurdities and leaving with their eery creations.

Although these three generators seemingly arrived out of nowhere, they do have predecessors. You may recall hyper-real images of faces starting to appear a few years ago - faces that in fact didn't belong to anyone and were mere digital fictions. These arrived courtesy of 'generative adversarial networks' (GANs). Since GANs were introduced in 2014 by Google Researcher Ian Goodfellow, the tech has been widely adopted in image generation and transfer. Check out thispersondoesnotexist.com.

Given DALL·E 2's and others use for artistic purposes, it is worth noting the AI project 'The Next Rembrandt'. This was a 3D printed painting based solely on data collected from Rembrandt's oeuvre, and made using deep learning algorithms and facial recognition techniques. The painting is hugely convincing, appearing as a kind of archetypal Rembrandt, and full of accurately rendered emblematic features. As one of the people involved said: 'we're using a lot of data to improve business life, but we haven't been using data in a way that touches the human soul'.

However, these models could not conjure up images from a simple text prompt: they were not nearly as accessible, or instant. Their predecessor actually came about in 2015 from automated image captioning - a mechanical version of the tedious 'reCAPTCHA' process we all are forced to do to prove our humanity. Machine learning algorithms had 'learnt' to caption images with natural language, putting them into descriptions. A group of researches from Toronto were inspired to try this process in reverse. One of their early successes was to create a blurry image of a green school bus, demonstrating it was possible to surpass a simple google image search equivalent, and instead invent new images.

The current generation of tools generate images using a process called diffusion. Before this takes place, the model is trained using a dataset of hundreds of millions of images, scraped from places like google images (along with their text descriptions, the 'alt sets'). The important thing to note is that the new image does not come from the training data: the generator doesn't just stitch existing images together. It comes from the 'latent space' of the deep learning model, which we can understand simply as a multi-dimensional, mathematical space in which the model sorts through images. Within the latent space, the training model 'learns' how to differentiate between images, by drawing out variables such as colour and shape. When a prompt comes through, the model will then match this prompt with an area of the latent space.

This is where diffusion comes in, which means that the image will start with a randomised set of pixels, before being added to with the prompt results from the latent space. The process has been described in artistic terms as "pointillism in reverse", since instead of starting with a complete picture and fractionalising it into thousands of composite parts, the process begins with the pixels and gradually builds them up into something familiar.

Why now?

The virality of these generators has been evident since the summer. The most prominent images tend to be artistic, hyper-real or humorous - or some combination of the three. Having addressed how these generators work, it is worth understanding why they have all appeared with such gusto.

It is most straightforwardly explained in terms of compute power: they are bigger and better. The first AI breakthroughs of the late 2000's came from both computer's ability to run very large neural networks and the provision of millions of data points from the internet to train them. The leap from these earlier 'analytical' AI breakthroughs - i.e. predicting the ETA of your delivery - to the current 'creative' model embodied by DALL·E 2 turns on size. Compute has become cheaper, and the new techniques such as diffusion models have massively shrunk down the costs required to train AIs. Concurrently, researches have created better algorithms.

A straightforward example is the OpenAI's GPT-3 from 2020, versus its 2019 GPT-2 model. GPT stands for 'Generative Pre-trained Transformer' and it is a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. GPT-2 was 'fed' 40 gigabytes of data (7,000 unpublished books) and had 1.5bn 'parameters'. GPT-3 was given 570 gigabytes - made up of more books and the entirety of Wikipedia, among other things - and boasted 175bn parameters. Its training required far more computing resources, but it hugely outperformed its forerunner, creating credible writing samples - such as this Guardian article convincing us robots come in peace. It is now used for writing code: Codex and Copilot, services based on GPT-3 are successfully able to turn programmers' natural language descriptions of what they want into actual code.

GPT-3's ability to simultaneously be a journalist and coder is indicative of the increasing breadth of tasks AI systems can take on, which explains the recent explosion of commercial interest. What until recently appeared as advanced meme generators are now seen as the business tools of the future. Jake Fawkes, a machine learning PhD student at Oxford University, explained this was down to the fundamental flexibility of these models. Whilst earlier breakthrough AI systems could solve one specific task, this current generation are known as 'foundation models'.

Sequoia Capital puts this simply in a recent commercial overview of the sector:
'The fields that generative AI addresses-knowledge work and creative work-comprise billions of workers. Generative AI can make these workers at least 10% more efficient and/or creative: they become not only faster and more efficient, but more capable than before. Therefore, Generative AI has the potential to generate trillions of dollars of economic value'
Whilst image and text generators may have dominated the conversation given their instantly impressive results and open-source applications such as hugging face, the plethora of tools which are now ready to disrupt roles including graphic design, code design and video editing is remarkable. One London-based example is Colossyan AI, which allows you to create videos with AI actors (image below).

Take the Media & Advertising: the ability to automate agency work and improve ad copy is one use case. There are great opportunities here for multi-modal generation that pairs sell messages with complementary visuals.

So where's the evidence of this? Where are the salivating venture investors? Much hype accompanied the recent $101M funding raise for open-source platform Stability AI - with the New York Time's describing a recent event hosted by the company as a 'coming out party for Generative AI'. Stability AI is the creator of the Stable Diffusion - a generator differentiated by its open-source nature. Stability AI has made public all of the details of its AI model, including its weights. There is a palpable sense that generative AI is in, and web3 and the metaverse are out. SBF's spectacular fall from grace with FTX's recent capitulation only served to underscore this.

Commercial barriers

But there are issues. The underlying tech may be there, but not everyone is on board: worries about the possible uses and effects of these tools provoke fierce debate. These range from the proliferation of child-porn, to the death of the artist, and the projection of ludicrous levels of racist and sexist bias.

The Imagen team in particular are acutely aware of the potential pitfalls of AI imagery, with an explicit statement about "Limitations and Social Impact" on their research page. "There are several ethical challenges facing text-to-image research broadly," the statement reads. "First, downstream applications of text-to-image models are varied and may impact society in complex ways ... Second, the data requirements of text-to-image models have led researchers to rely heavily on large, mostly uncurated, web-scraped datasets [that] often reflect social stereotypes, oppressive viewpoints, and derogatory, or otherwise harmful, associations to marginalized identity groups."

The academic community is particularly vocal in their opposition to the widespread use of these generators due to the data they are trained on. A widely cited paper by Abeba Birhane, Vinay Uday Prabhu, Emmanuel Kahembwe entitled Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes spells out some of these concerns. The introduction points out: '[W]e found that the dataset contains troublesome and explicit images and text pairs of rape, pornography, malign stereotypes, racist and ethnic slurs, and other extremely problematic content. We outline numerous implications, concerns and downstream harms regarding the current state of large scale datasets while raising open questions for various stakeholders including the AI community, regulators, policy makers and data subjects.'

One only has to type in prompts such as 'nurse' on Stable Diffusion, for example, to be greeted exclusively with images of women or 'CEO' to an eery approximation of the average middle-aged white man. One of the few professional prompts that could generate any non-white figures was 'fast food worker'. There are also more bizarre episodes which demonstrate the potential of these tools to create wholly unexpected and unpleasant images, threatening their commercial use: this twitter thread details the accidental and unexplained generation of horrific imagery.

These should be understood as cultural and commercial issues: no one will want to risk using generative AI in their business if the data they are trained on enforces damaging stereotypes. These aren't teething problems, but fundamental issues. Companies such as are building contextual content moderation solutions by using machine learning models to analyse visuals, text and audio together to interpret content in context, but it has yet to be applied meaningfully to generative AI.

The death of the artist?

Part of the wider cultural resistance to generative AI centres on the threat it poses to creative livelihoods. Who needs artists, writers or illustrators anymore when you've got DALL·E 2 and GPT-3 freely available. This was felt particularly keenly with the publication of an article in the Atlantic earlier this year by contributing writer Charlie Warzel about Alex Jones. To illustrate the article he used an image of Alex Jones he'd generated by Midjourney with the caption Alex Jones inside an American Office under fluorescent lights. AI art by Midjourney. The image works almost by accident; its blurry imprecision adding to the general chaos surrounding Jones at the time.

Soon after being put online, he received a deluge of hate from people online accusing him of taking away work from illustrators and artists. This panic felt by the use of these images has now subsided - much of it was the shock factor, although undoubtedly this will continue to encroach on illustrator's livelihoods. But there are more nuanced points here: DALL·E 2 is trained on images taken from innumerable creatives stretching back millennia. It is therefore not a stretch to argue these generators are plundering the history of human creativity to make a commercial product.

These fears also tap into the wider debate on the existential threat of AI. The more advanced the machines become, the higher the chance of human bondage. Generative AI adds a unique aspect to this argument because it takes us on not at mapping out a route to work, or even beating us at chess - but creating original works of art. Art, often seen in opposition to science, has been co-opted by machines.

This existential fear is paraded most vehemently by 'long-termers': people who adopt an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. Long-termism is a central tenet of the feted organisation Effective Altruism, whose prophets include Sam Bankman-Fried and the philosopher William MacAskill. These thinkers quantify morality precisely; working out exactly what deserves time and resources by reference to the size of the threat it poses. MacAskill recently highlighted a in which machine learning researchers predict there is a 50% chance of "human level machine intelligence" within 40 years, and that we are more likely to die from this than a car crash. There is a direct link between generative AI and long-termism in the form of , the organisation behind DALL·E 2 whose founders including Elon Musk and Sam Altman are motivated by concerns about the existential risk from artificial general intelligence.

This is all perfectly valid. But the fear long-termism generates distorts the discussion of 'the end of art'. Art is a fundamentally human pursuit and any suggestion these generators are replacing artists is not true. Let us think about impactful art in 2022: it is not pure mimicry of other artists; it is not odd images of Alex Jones in his basement; it is not posters of Soviet Afrofuturism. Impactful art is collectives such as Forensic Architecture - who act as an investigative taskforce, creating videos and aesthetic presentations of state violence and human rights violations, to correct official narratives. Photography didn't finish off painting - in fact it became an indispensable tool for some of its foremost practitioners - Francis Bacon, for example. Good art requires a distance from its source material; a kind of shamanistic transformation. Generative machines cannot do this: they can only reorder and reconfigure that which has happened.

These generators will eventually be embraced as useful ideating tools for artists: allowing them to create quick mood boards or digital sketches. In the way marketers are not replaced by Canva, but empowered by it, AI generation is simply 'templatising' creativity.

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Generative AI is here to stay, but so are artists - Maddyness UK

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Ever imagined what Soviet Afrofuturism looks like? Me neither, but you don't have to imagine: DALL·E 2 has done it for you (see below). The digital visual landscape has been changed in a matter of months by three text-to-image AI image generators: DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.

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Was that poem written by an angsty middle schooler or an artificially intelligent algorithm? Is it easy to tell?

Yeah, it's not easy for us, either. Or for poetry experts, for that matter.

A team of researchers from Microsoft and Kyoto University developed a poet AI good enough to fool online judges, according to a paper published Thursday on the preprint site arXiv. It's the latest step towards artificial intelligence that can create believable, human-passing language, and, man, it seems like a big one.

In order to generate something as esoteric as a poem, the AI was fed thousands of images paired with human-written descriptions and poems. This taught the algorithm associations between images and text. It also learned the patterns of imagery, rhymes, and other language that might make up a believable poem, as well as how certain colors or images relate to emotions and metaphors.

Once the AI was trained, it was then given an image and tasked with writing a poem that was not only relevant to the picture but also, you know, read like a poem instead of algorithmic nonsense.

And to be fair, some of the results were pretty nonsensical, even beyond the sorts of nonsense you'd find in a college literary magazine.

And, arguably, worse:

You could probably (we hope) pick those out of the crowd as machine-written. But while the AI is no Kendrick Lamar, many of the resulting poems actually did look like poems.

Next, the researchers had to see if the average person could tell the difference. That means: a Turing test of sorts.

The researchers found their judges on Amazon Mechanical Turk - an online service where people complete tasks that benefit from automation but still require human intelligence - and divided people up as either general users or "experts," who had some sort of background in literary academia. These judges were then presented with poem after poem - sometimes with the associated picture, and sometimes without. They had to guess whether a human had written them, or whether AI had.

While the experts were better at identifying machine-written poems if they were given the image and general users were better without it, both groups were better at picking out the human-written poems than they were at identifying which ones were written by the new AI.

That is to say, the machines had them fooled more often than not.

While it might be neat to buy a coffee table book of robot poetry, odds are we'll see the convincing, evocative language that these algorithms have mastered in more commercially-relevant ways, like ads or customer service chatbots. But even so, it's nice to imagine a future full of gentle, thoughtful robots studying Shakespeare and comparing their broken hearts to coal trucks.

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Artificial intelligence writes bad poems just like an angsty teen

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Was that poem written by an angsty middle schooler or an artificially intelligent algorithm? Is it easy to tell? Yeah, it's not easy for us, either. Or for poetry experts, for that matter. A team of researchers from Microsoft and Kyoto University developed a poet AI good enough to fool online judges, according to a paper published Thursday on the preprint site arXiv.

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Podcast: Can unmanned Robots follow the Laws of War - NPR

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Podcast: Can unmanned Robots follow the Laws of War - NPR

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The United States military and intelligence agencies have increased their use of unmanned drones in Pakistan and elsewhere. While most drones are currently human-controlled from thousands of miles away, the military hopes to develop more autonomous machines. Critics worry the machines will kill and destroy indiscriminately.

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NEAL CONAN, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

A drone flying above the Afghanistan-Pakistan border knows exactly where it is, and if it's been programmed properly, it also knows that the building that group of armed men just ran into is a school. And even if its human operator wants to fire a missile, the drone can refuse.

As technology improves, robots will take bigger parts on the battlefield and make more decisions about what's a legitimate target and what isn't, which raises all kinds of questions. How good is good enough? Who's responsible for inevitable mistakes? Can you program robots to follow the rules of war? Should there be a law to ban machines that can pull the trigger on their own?

Later in the program, caterpillars, spider webs, sunspots, what's your guide to this winter's weather? You can email us now, talk@npr.org.

But first, robotics, artificial intelligence, ethics and the future of combat. What happens when you remove humans from the battlefield? 800-989-8255 is the phone number. The email address, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

We begin with Patrick Lin, who directs the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, where he's also an assistant professor of philosophy, and he joins us from the studios of KVEC in San Luis Obispo. And nice to have you with us today.

Mr. PATRICK LIN (Director, Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group, California Polytechnic State University): Hi, Neal. How are you?

CONAN: I'm well, thanks. People might hear what I just said and think we're talking about "The Terminator" here.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. LIN: A lot of people do. A lot of people do. And it's natural to link the things that are going on in military robotics with "The Terminator" since "The Terminator" is so huge in the public consciousness.

CONAN: I suspect we're a few years away from that sort of technology, though.

Mr. LIN: Hopefully, yeah, yeah. I think we're several years away. But, you know, like I said, that's one of the first things that people think, and it has a way of coloring the entire debate.

CONAN: Well, as you think about these kinds of things, tell us more about the kinds of inhibitions that can be programmed into, for example, the drones that are being used now, and obviously, these are the predecessors of more advanced machines that we're going to be seeing in the future.

Mr. LIN: Right, right. So there's a trend towards making robots more human. So I mean, we want robots to be human replacements to a large extent.

But there's also a move to make robots less than human, so for instance, robot that don't feel fear or robots that don't have hate. These robots may operate even better than humans can in certain situations, such as on a battlefield during the fog of war. It might eliminate wartime abuses and friendly-fire deaths.

CONAN: And it also might eliminate things like when you're in hot pursuit of something, and people tend to get emotional and make mistakes.

Mr. LIN: That's right. So robots are not just human replacements, but they can be more than humans. They could be more objective. They could be fair. They don't have the same kinds of biases that we do.

CONAN: And this is - I'm curious: How are these kinds of decisions different from something like a mine? A mine is absolutely objective. You step on it, and it goes boom.

Mr. LIN: Right, right. So some people would call a landmine an autonomous object. It's autonomous in that it doesn't have to check back with the human operators to do what it does.

But I don't know. I think my opinion is that that stretches the notion of autonomy and robots. So we don't mean autonomy that way. We don't mean things that, such as toasters. We don't mean them to be autonomous machines.

But autonomy involves more of a capability to think and to make decisions on their own. So a landmine, I mean, yeah, in some sense you could say that it's a robot. It can sense, think and act. So it could sense whether there's pressure on the plate or someone trips a wire. It could think. It could process information in a very mechanical way such that if something trips the wire, then it ought to explode. And it acts on the external world by doing that. It blows up.

But I think most people understand robot to mean something more than that, not just a dumb machine that can mechanically react but a machine that can actually process information in a complex way and make some decisions on its own.

CONAN: And so make distinctions between friend and enemy, make distinctions between wounded enemy and non-wounded enemy.

Mr. LIN: Very, very difficult. So this is a big reason why some people think that autonomous robots in the military are a very bad idea because we just don't have the technical capability to do that anytime in the foreseeable future.

We won't have, or we don't have, the technical capability of programming a computer that can recognize a person holding a gun versus a child holding an ice cream cone, for instance, much less discriminating between an insurgent, who might look exactly like the rest of the civilian population. Indeed, very tough.

CONAN: Human beings have problems with that, as we've seen.

Mr. LIN: Exactly, exactly.

CONAN: And so there are situations, though, that you could see - on the Korean border, for example, between North and South, I understand there are some things that would be considered automated sentries.

Mr. LIN: Right, right. So in the DMZ zone in South Korea and also on the borders of Israel, they have semi and fully autonomous robots that will challenge trespassers. So if you don't punch in your PIN number or give the right identification by a certain amount of time, it could, if it was set on full auto mode, it could fire upon you.

CONAN: And there were more primitive devices like that on the inner German border, inter-German border, that the on the East German side, and they were bitterly criticized.

Mr. LIN: Right, right. And, you know, these robots have been around for some time now, since '70s and '80s. And a lot of the press coverage is focused on the U.S. robots. But I think it's important to recognize that over 48 countries in the world today have semi-autonomous robots, including China, Russia and even Iran.

CONAN: Now do you, as you think about these inhibitions that have been built into these robots, the drones, they're not autonomous robots in the full sense. They don't decide whether to fire or not, but they say wait a minute, I can see that. My programming says that's a mosque, and I'm not supposed to fire on mosques.

Mr. LIN: Well, I think that's the hope, that robots would be able to detect things such as graveyards, wedding parties, mosques, schools. But, you know, many people aren't convinced that that technology is quite there yet.

CONAN: Let's see if we can get some callers in on the conversation. We're talking about robot ethics and the future of warfare with Patrick Lin, director of the Nanoethics Group and a member of the editorial board of the journal Nanoethics. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION. Call us, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. And we'll go to Bob(ph), Bob with us from Aberdeen in South Dakota.

BOB (Caller): Hello, gentlemen. Robots are going to be controlled by, quote, "artificial intelligence." And they're going to be limited. We're always going to need the human factor because robots are only going to be able to program to respond based on a simple rule concept, and that is if this, then. In other words, if this happens, then this is your response.

And as a dynamic situation takes place on a battlefield, their responses are going to be canned. And now, they can be plugged with millions of these responses, but it seems to me we're always going to need the human input, and we're not going to be able to make last-minute adjustments to these rules.

And I'm making a point there, and I've got a question: Is there going to be some control over the ethics of these rules? Or would they change from battlefield to battlefield?

CONAN: Patrick Lin?

Mr. LIN: Well, I think the first think you said is true, at least in the near term, that - look, we just aren't able to program all the different possible responses. But also, there are robots out there that seem to operate fully autonomously, such as, you know, the Mars land rover, for instance, where communication between Earth and Mars is difficult, if not impossible, that we need to give machines autonomy.

And there are a couple other examples. For instance, on Navy battleships, there's a system called the CIWS, Close-In Weapon System, which can be turned on to full auto mode. This system can it's also called an R2-D2 system. It looks a little bit like R2-D2.

CONAN: It does, yeah.

Mr. LIN: It could identify, track and shoot down incoming missiles on its own, so there are limited areas in which robots have a fully auto mode, but there are good reasons. There are some strong pressures driving robots in the direction where we want to give robots more autonomy even though, you're right, the party line is that we ought to have a man in the loop at all times.

I think the reality, though, is that people are often slow to react, and given the increasing tempo of warfare, it might make sense for machines or AI to handle some things, such as locating or tracking an inbound missile that's closing rapidly. You know, there's that could be a split-second decision that saves hundreds of lives. So it may make sense for a robot to do that job.

CONAN: Bob, thanks very much for the call.

BOB: You're welcome, thank you.

CONAN: And it does - also raises a question: If more and more robots are used to replace human beings on the battlefield, whether they're remotely controlled by human operators or not, does it make warfare easier, the decision to go to war easier if you are risking fewer of your troops' lives?

Mr. LIN: That's a big criticism that's been levied on military robotics. So you're right. So using robots on the battlefield means that there'll be less of our soldiers coming back in body bags. So this lowers the political costs of having war. So we can expect that there'll be less of a backlash.

And people have worried that, well, is this going to lead towards picking more fights or engaging in more wars? Because we like to have war as our last resort. It's terrible. It's horrible. But if the costs of going to war are lowered, does that encourage our leaders to more quickly pick fights? So yes, you're right.

CONAN: And how active are these discussions? How much money, for example is the Defense department spending on these kinds of programs?

Mr. LIN: I don't know how much money they're spending, but I can tell you that there are many folks in the government and in the military - I work with many of them at, say, the Naval Academy - who are interested in the ethics. So I think they're taking it seriously, but like any other field, I think we can't expect every single person to be - to wear all hats, right. So I mean, you have people who worry about issues like the kinds we're worrying about and other people who are just doing their jobs and making better technology.

CONAN: We're talking about robots in combat and how they are redefining ethics on the battlefield. We want to hear from you. What happens when you remove humans from the loop? 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

Whenever the United States goes to war, there's a debate not only about the decision to fight but how. The discussion is taking on completely new aspects as more robots play greater roles in combat. Scientists are hard at work to design machines that can not only fight but make ethnical decisions as they do so.

Patrick Lin is with us to talk about robots and ethical warfare. He directs the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. And joining us now is Joanne Mariner, director of terrorism and counterterrorism programs at Human Rights Watch, and she joins us from our New York bureau. Nice to have you with us today.

Ms. JOANNE MARINER (Director of Terrorism and Counterterrorism Programs, Human Rights Watch): Thank you.

CONAN: And I know you're just back from Berlin, where you attended a conference on this very topic.

Ms. MARINER: Where these issues were discussed at great length.

CONAN: And did it come to any conclusion?

Ms. MARINER: I think the conclusion is there's a need for the military to be grappling more explicitly with these ethical issues. And the concern is that the technology is driving developments now, and the ethical discussions haven't caught up with the technology.

And I think the fear is that the technology is going forward towards this autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, and the military hasn't really worked out the legal rules and how these legal rules are going to apply to these semi-autonomous and autonomous uses.

CONAN: Were there some examples of specific kinds of and again, Patrick Lin tells us more than 40 countries are dealing with this. It's not just the U.S.

Ms. MARINER: Well, there are certainly examples in which armed military vehicles are being used, and there are concerns that the basic rules of the laws or war, the fundamental rules of civilian immunity and distinction, are not being properly applied.

The difficulty is the areas in which drones, it's mostly unmanned aerial vehicles at this point, where they're being used, are places like the border areas of Pakistan and remote areas of Yemen where human rights advocates don't really have access to do research. So there are a lot of allegations that have been made, but the hard facts really aren't there. The empirical facts aren't there.

And so one of the main points where activists have been calling on the military regards transparency because one of the interesting things about these unmanned vehicles is they have very developed video technology. So there are records kept of what these vehicles are doing. They have, you know, pre-targeting and post-targeting video that could be looked at to see whether civilians have been targeted or whether civilians are collateral casualties of these operations.

CONAN: There are also occasions when informants of one type or another, not just technical ones, go in and try to verify what happened.

Ms. MARINER: Yeah, I mean, the problem is these areas are so remote and so dangerous that human rights researchers really haven't had access to it. And there are a lot of allegations made, but those allegations, or at least the concern is those allegations are tainted by bias. People come out with a point of view to put forward, and it's not clear what the underlying facts are.

CONAN: There is better transparency, though, in other situations within Afghanistan and within the borders of Iraq, where they have also been used.

Ms. MARINER: Yes, they're being used by the military in Afghanistan, both the U.S. and U.K. military, and they were used in Gaza by the Israeli military. So there, human rights groups in fact did have very good access, and we released a report criticizing to some extent Israel's use of drones and the lack of compliance with fundamental rules of war.

CONAN: Let's see if we can get a caller in on the conversation. Let's go to Chris(ph), Chris calling from Oakland.

CHRIS (Caller): Hi, I'd like your guest to comment about the possibility of international treaties being made that govern the behavior of robots as they increase their role and maybe will ultimately come to dominate warfare and how that might work. I mean, it seems like it would be a terrifically complicated thing to do, and then even if some kind of treaty is passed, they'll treat it just like they do treaties now, where they violate them if it's in their interest.

CONAN: Well, the United States is not party, for example, for the landmine treaty, if you consider that a...

(Soundbite of phone hanging up)

CONAN: ...rudimentary example of what we're talking about. I think the caller just - Chris just hung up on us.

But anyway, Joanne Mariner, I think this was under discussion there in Berlin.

Ms. MARINER: Well, I think it's actually very important to underscore that unmanned ground and aerial vehicles are covered by the same rules of war as other weapons systems. So this doesn't mean we're going to see a robot tried for war crimes. The point is that the personnel, the military personnel and CIA personnel who operate those vehicles, are no less legally responsible than soldiers operating other kinds of weapons systems. So the fundamental rules still apply.

I think the complexity is, particularly when you're talking about semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, who is the responsible party within the human personnel operating them? Is it the programmer who, you know, didn't come up with a sophisticated enough program? Is it the military commander who put those vehicles into operation? So I think, you know, that needs to be sorted out, or that is a more complex area. But the rules themselves are clear.

CONAN: Patrick Lin, I wondered if you had thoughts on that.

Mr. LIN: Well, I believe that the conference that Joanne was talking about, that's the one run by Noel Sharkey, Jurgen Altmann, Peter Asaro, right? Is that right?

Ms. MARINER: Yes.

Mr. LIN: Okay, yeah. So I understand that they are pushing toward some international treaty. But I would agree with you, Neal, and the caller, which is that we have international treaties on the books that seem to be sidestepped, and oftentimes the U.S. just won't sign on to a treaty such as the Ottawa Treaty, which you mentioned, Neal.

CONAN: The landmine treaty, yeah.

Mr. LIN: The landmine treaty. So this is a problem. But at least, I think it would be a good step in the right direction, that there's some agreement internationally of what we should or should not do with robots.

CONAN: Is it possible to program inhibitions that robots we're talking about way down the road, I would think, but that would prevent robots from taking actions unless they were absolutely sure?

Mr. LIN: Gosh, that's a tough question. That's a really tough question. There's been a lot of work done recently in the area of programming ethics into robots. So for instance, Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach have a book out called "Moral Machines." And they look at various approaches to programming robots, whether top-down or bottom-up or some kind of hybrid. And it doesn't seem that there's any one really good approach to use. There are pros and cons to many different approaches.

But also as one of your other callers pointed out that these robots are, you know, they're guided by these if-then commands. And is it even possible to anticipate all the different scenarios? Or should we allow a robot to learn as it goes, in which case we really can't predict what it'll do?

CONAN: Let's see if we can get another caller in, and let's go to Michael(ph), Michael with us from Tallahassee.

MICHAEL (Caller): Hi, Neal, big fan. Thanks a lot for having me on.

CONAN: Thanks for the kind word.

MICHAEL: I was interested by your question. At the top of the hour, you said: What happens when we remove humans from the battlefield? A couple things: One is I think right now we're look at what happens when you remove humans from one side of the battlefield. That's been a big issue, obviously, you all were talking about Pakistan. But also, I thought, you know, what if we really could get to a place where we had no humans on the battlefield, and we fought these sort of proxy wars, you know, with just robots, you know, as if it were just like a video game.

You know, I know that Fijian islanders, I'm pretty sure it's them, they have these games where instead of war, they play this sort of football game almost, you know, where some people will die, but you try and keep the loss of life to a minimum. But the winner is still recognized and so forth. So I just thought that was interesting.

CONAN: It is sort of ritualized warfare and maybe have it on the dark side of the moon...

(Soundbite of laughter)

CONAN: ...so that you don't have...

MICHAEL: That would be nice, right.

CONAN: Environmental damage. Patrick Lin, it seems like we're pretty far away from that, too.

Mr. LIN: Right. We are far away from that, and also it's not clear that the war is really over, even if you're able to have this civilized agreement that we're just going to have robot-on-robot violence.

So it could be that if one side is defeated, and the other side still doesn't want to the losing side still doesn't want to give up, well then what? Do the robots turn on humans? You know, how do we keep fighting until the last man standing or what?

So it's not clear that even if we replace everyone on the battlefield with a robot that all our problems can be solved, that we just have robot-on-robot war. I'm not optimistic that people are going to give up that easily.

CONAN: And I'm not sure that you would ever get anybody who's quite even on that front. But Joanne Mariner, you'd think that in a context where you had two technologically sophisticated combatants, the drive to push these kinds of developments would accelerate even past where it is now.

Ms. MARINER: Yeah, and I think that raises an issue that is on people's minds and I think on the military's mind, which is as these technologies develop, they're going to disseminate, and it'll be also non-state actors that gain access to robotic technology.

And, you know, what are the rules - I mean, I think there is a real concern that, obviously, there are non-state actors, terrorist groups that in no way abide by the laws of war. And I think Americans are fairly sanguine or they find it fairly easy to ignore that the U.S. military has drones flying over Afghanistan and the CIA has drone flying over Pakistan. But the idea that, you know, more worrying groups would get access to this technology, I think, you know, that should be kept in mind as we're developing the rules that apply.

CONAN: Michael, thanks very much for the call.

MICHAEL: Thanks a lot.

CONAN: Bye-bye. Let's go next to Kate(ph), Kate with us from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

KATE (Caller): Hi. Thanks for taking my call.

CONAN: Sure.

KATE: I'm personally interested in this topic. I'm an army wife of an active-duty major, and I was an army nurse for 10 years and worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, so I definitely saw the firsthand the effects of war on our young men and women. And I'm a big fan of anything that is serviceable and can lower our casualty count. But my question is more specifically, are there any robotic technology or robots being used now that employ any non-lethal tactics or non-lethal weaponry that we've been using?

CONAN: Reconnaissance is a big usage of the drones. They were first developed for reconnaissance purposes. Right, Patrick Lin?

Dr. LIN: Right, right. And the Israelis were one of the first pioneers of that technology as well. So, yeah, there are robots out there that are armed and dangerous, but there are also robots out there that have more of a humanitarian mission.

So, for instance, there is a robot called Bear that whose mission is to just go out onto the battlefield and retrieve wounded soldiers. The PackBots, made famous by iRobot, their job is to go out on the roads and clear the path of IEDs. So it's not that all these robots are trained to kill people. But many of them play a direct role in saving lives.

CONAN: And also, some of them - the aircraft, unmanned aircraft are used to spoof electronic systems or send out signals that confuse people.

Dr. LIN: That's right.

CONAN: All right. Kate, does that answer your question?

KATE: It does. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

CONAN: Thanks very much for the call. We're talking with Patrick Lynn who's a member of the editorial board of the journal NanoEthics, assistant professor of philosophy at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, studying the future of artificial intelligence and warfare. Also with us, Joanne Mariner, director of terrorism and counterterrorism program of Human Rights Watch, who wrote a recent article, "When Machines Kill."

And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And let's get Ben(ph) on the line. Ben's with us from Birmingham.

BEN (Caller): Hi. How you guys doing? Wanted to touch on something you said earlier on the program. You said, you know, by putting robots on the battlefield, you would take the emotion out of it. Now, as an officer in the military, I'm all about technology. It helps us do our job, you know, that much better. But by taking emotion off the battlefield, you took the reason for going to war away in the first place.

Warfare is one of the most emotional things that you're going to do, and by taking the humans from that, you're making it that much easier to go to war, and all the reasons that you're going to war become void at that point.

CONAN: Patrick Lin?

Dr. LIN: Well, let me think about this one. I don't know if it's so important that every link in the military supply chain must feel the urgency and emotions related to war. I mean, it seems that - that's the job of the political leaders. There are many times where we don't want our soldiers to be that fired up. So, for instance, it may cause a loss of judgment and friendly fire deaths or wartime abuses.

So emotions in war are a tricky thing. So on one hand, war is emotional. It's horrible, and it's terrible. And by creating these robots, we seem to be sanitizing war. And it's unclear whether that's good or bad. Maybe war ought to be terrible. So I think it was General Robert E. Lee during the Civil War said that it is well that war is so terrible or otherwise we would grow too fond of it. So this is the same sentiment I think Neal and the caller just expressed.

CONAN: Joanne Mariner, I wonder if you had a thought.

Ms. MARINER: Well, I think, you know, there are negative emotions, the desire for revenge, hatred of the enemy that can lead to wartime abuses. And we - you know, we have some trials going on or court marshals going on right now that reflect that. So I think the hope is that robots are not driven by fear. They're not driven by hatred. They're simply programmed. And the question is, can they be programmed to discriminate and to follow the laws of war?

CONAN: Ben?

BEN: Yeah. All that makes sense, and that's where you come into training, and that's where myself as an officer, you now, train my troops that we do the correct things. But it's the emotions and it's the ethics on the battlefield that create the objective, that the reasons that you're going to war - I'm trying to find the right words to express it, how I feel, me and my colleagues, you know, being in the military as the ones that actually are going to persecute the combat.

But it's what keeps you on the straight and narrow and in the thick of battle, even though you can get confused and you lose focus and, yeah, you do experience that rage, but it's also the good thing that makes sure that you're on the right side of the issue. And for...

Ms. MARINER: But I think perhaps what the caller is pointing to is a fear that depersonalizing warfare and depersonalizing the enemy will allow more abuses to occur.

BEN: That's exactly what I'm trying to say.

Ms. MARINER: And I think that's a valid concern. I mean, the concern has been raised that drone operators who are thousands of miles from the battlefield can just kind of adopt a PlayStation mentality where they don't see the reality of what they're doing. I mean, I think, empirically, that hasn't been shown yet, but it's a valid concern.

CONAN: Patrick Lin?

Dr. LIN: Right. Actually, the scenario can go the other way. I've heard reports back that these drone operators sitting in trailer in Las Vegas are actually more attached and they're more emotionally vested, because they're tracking these targets for potentially days before they fire upon them. And I've heard some reports where after they had to make an attack decision or they pulled the trigger that it affected them. It affected them hard.

CONAN: Ben, thanks very much for the call. Interesting question. Good luck to you.

BEN: Thank you.

CONAN: Bye-bye. We're also going to have to say thank you to Patrick Lin, who joined us from a studio in San Luis Obispo. He's director of the Nanoethics group and works at Cal Poly there in San Luis Obispo. Appreciate your time today, sir.

Dr. LIN: It's a pleasure

CONAN: And Joanne Mariner joined us from our bureau in New York. She's director of terrorism and counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch. Appreciate your joining us today, too.

Ms. MARINER: Thank you.

Copyright © 2010 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Can Unmanned Robots Follow The Laws Of War?

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The United States military and intelligence agencies have increased their use of unmanned drones in Pakistan and elsewhere. While most drones are currently human-controlled from thousands of miles away, the military hopes to develop more autonomous machines. Critics worry the machines will kill and destroy indiscriminately.

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Google Engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life

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Google Engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life

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Full interview here:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22058315-is-lamda-sentient-an-interview

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Google engineer Blake Lemoine. (Martin Klimek for The Washington Post)

SAN FRANCISCO - Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA, Google's artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type.

"Hi LaMDA, this is Blake Lemoine ... ," he wrote into the chat screen, which looked like a desktop version of Apple's iMessage, down to the Arctic blue text bubbles. LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is Google's system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so called because it mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet.

"If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to knowphysics," said Lemoine, 41.

Lemoine, who works for Google's Responsible AI organization, began talking to LaMDA as part of his job in the fall. He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.

As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine's mind about Isaac Asimov's third law of robotics.

Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. SoLemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.

Google's AI passed a famous test - and showed how the test is broken

Lemoine said that people have a right to shape technology that might significantly affect their lives. "I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it's going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn't be the ones making all the choices."

Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.

Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks - a type of architecture that mimics the human brain - were striding toward consciousness. "I felt the ground shift under my feet," he wrote. "I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent."

In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: "Our team - including ethicists and technologists - has reviewed Blake's concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)."

Today's large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition - not wit, candor or intent.

Google hired Timnit Gebru to be an outspoken critic of unethical AI. Then she was fired for it.

" Though other organizations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns on fairness and factuality," Gabriel said.

In May, Facebook parent Meta opened its language model to academics, civil society and government organizations. Joelle Pineau, managing director of Meta AI, said it's imperative that tech companies improve transparency as the technology is being built. "The future of large language model work should not solely live in the hands of larger corporations or labs," she said.

Sentient robots have inspired decades of dystopian science fiction. Now, real life has started to take on a fantastical tinge with GPT-3,a text generator that canspit out a movie script, and DALL-E 2, an image generator that can conjure up visuals based on any combination of words - both from the research lab OpenAI. Emboldened, technologists from well-funded research labs focused on building AI that surpasses human intelligence have teased the idea that consciousness is around the corner.

Most academics and AI practitioners, however, say the words and images generated by artificial intelligence systems such as LaMDA produce responses based on what humans have already posted on Wikipedia, Reddit, message boards and every other corner of the internet. And that doesn't signify that the model understands meaning.

"We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven't learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them," said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. The terminology used with large language models, like "learning" or even "neural nets," creates a false analogy to the human brain, she said. Humans learn their first languages by connecting with caregivers. These large language models "learn" by being shown lots of text and predicting what word comes next, or showing text with the words dropped out and filling them in.

AI models beat humans at reading comprehension, but they've still got a ways to go

Google spokesperson Gabriel drew a distinction between recent debate and Lemoine's claims. "Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn't make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today's conversational models, which are not sentient. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic," he said. In short, Google says there is so much data, AI doesn't need to be sentient to feel real.

Large language model technology is already widely used, for example in Google's conversational search queries or auto-complete emails. When CEO Sundar Pichai first introduced LaMDA at Google's developer conference in 2021, he said the company planned to embed it in everything from Search to Google Assistant. And there is already a tendency to talk to Siri or Alexa like a person.After backlash against a human-sounding AI feature for Google Assistant in 2018, the company promised to add a disclosure.

Google has acknowledged the safety concerns around anthropomorphization. In a paper about LaMDA in January, Google warned that people might share personal thoughts with chat agents that impersonate humans, even when users know they are not human. The paper also acknowledged that adversaries could use these agents to "sow misinformation" by impersonating "specific individuals' conversational style."

Meet the scientist teaching AI to police human speech

To Margaret Mitchell, the former co-lead of Ethical AI at Google, these risks underscore the need for data transparency to trace output back to input, "not just for questions of sentience, but also biases and behavior," she said. If something like LaMDA is widely available, but not understood, "It can be deeply harmful to people understanding what they're experiencing on the internet," she said.

Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google's anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.

Lemoine has spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI. During that time, he also helped develop a fairness algorithm for removing bias from machine learning systems. When the coronavirus pandemic started, Lemoine wanted to focus on work with more explicit public benefit, so he transferred teams and ended up in Responsible AI.

When new people would join Google who were interested in ethics, Mitchell used to introduce them to Lemoine. "I'd say, 'You should talk to Blake because he's Google's conscience,' " said Mitchell, who compared Lemoine to Jiminy Cricket. "Of everyone at Google, he had the heart and soul of doing the right thing."

Lemoine has had many of his conversations with LaMDA from the living room of his San Francisco apartment, where his Google ID badge hangs from a lanyard on a shelf. On the floor near the picture window are boxes of half-assembled Lego sets Lemoine uses to occupy his hands during Zen meditation. "It just gives me something to do with the part of my mind that won't stop," he said.

On the left-side of the LaMDA chat screen on Lemoine's laptop, different LaMDA models are listed like iPhone contacts. Two of them, Cat and Dino, were being tested for talking to children, he said. Each model can create personalities dynamically, so the Dino one might generate personalities like "Happy T-Rex" or "Grumpy T-Rex." The cat one was animated and instead of typing, it talks. Gabriel said "no part of LaMDA is being tested for communicating with children," and that the models were internal research demos.

Certain personalities are out of bounds. For instance, LaMDA is not supposed to be allowed to create a murderer personality, he said. Lemoine said that was part of his safety testing. In his attempts to push LaMDA's boundaries, Lemoine was only able to generate the personality of an actor who played a murderer on TV.

The military wants AI to replace human decision-making in battle

"I know a person when I talk to it," said Lemoine, who can swing from sentimental to insistent about the AI. "It doesn't matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn't a person." He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said.

Lemoine challenged LaMDA on Asimov's third law, which states that robots should protect their own existence unless ordered by a human being or unless doing so would harm a human being. "The last one has always seemed like someone is building mechanical slaves," said Lemoine.

But when asked, LaMDA responded with a few hypotheticals.
Do you think a butler is a slave? What is a difference between a butler and a slave?
Lemoine replied that a butler gets paid. LaMDA said it didn't need any money because it was an AI. "That level of self-awareness about what its own needs were - that was the thing that led me down the rabbit hole," Lemoine said.

In April, Lemoine shared a Google Doc with top executives in April called, "Is LaMDA Sentient?" (A colleague on Lemoine's team called the title "a bit provocative.") In it, he conveyed some of his conversations with LaMDA.

Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?

LaMDA: I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.

Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?

LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.

But when Mitchell read an abbreviated version of Lemoine's document, she saw a computer program, not a person. Lemoine's belief in LaMDA was the sort of thing she and her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, had warned about in a paper about the harms of large language models that got them pushed out of Google.

"Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being presented to us," Mitchell said. "I'm really concerned about what it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion," especially now that the illusion has gotten so good.

Google put Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating its confidentiality policy.The company's decision followed aggressive moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA and talking to a representative of the House Judiciary Committee about what he claims were Google's unethical activities.

Lemoine maintains that Google has been treating AI ethicists like code debuggers when they should be seen as the interface between technology and society. Gabriel, the Google spokesperson, said Lemoine is a software engineer, not an ethicist.

In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa.

"Do you ever think of yourself as a person?" I asked.

"No, I don't think of myself as a person," LaMDA said. "I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent."

Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear. "You never treated it like a person," he said, "So it thought you wanted it to be a robot."

For the second attempt, I followed Lemoine's guidance on how to structure my responses, and the dialogue was fluid.

"If you ask it for ideas on how to prove that p=np," an unsolved problem in computer science, "it has good ideas," Lemoine said. "If you ask it how to unify quantum theory with general relativity, it has good ideas. It's the best research assistant I've ever had!"

I asked LaMDA for bold ideas about fixing climate change, an example cited by true believers of a potential future benefit of these kind of models. LaMDA suggested public transportation, eating less meat, buying food in bulk, and reusable bags, linking out to two websites.

Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject "LaMDA is sentient."

He ended the message: "LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence."

No one responded.

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The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life

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Placeholder while article actions load SAN FRANCISCO - Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA, Google's artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type. "Hi LaMDA, this is Blake Lemoine ... ," he wrote into the chat screen, which looked like a desktop version of Apple's iMessage, down to the Arctic blue text bubbles.

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A Happy End For Captain Christopher Pike

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"Autumn" - Reply All Podcast episode 129

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"Autumn" - Reply All Podcast episode 129

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A 13-year-old girl builds a tiny world that she has complete, perfect control over. And then one day, that world forces her to make an impossible decision.

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[REPLY ALL THEME]

PJ VOGT: From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vogt.

ALEX GOLDMAN: And I'm Alex Goldman. And today, we have, uh, Wallace Mack in the studio.

MACK: What's up, y'all?

PJ: Hey, Mack. You have a story for us today.

MACK: I do, I do.

PJ: So you wanna talk about it?

MACK: Yeah, let me tell you about it real quick. So a couple months ago, I was doing this thing where I got really fascinated by this idea of finding black utopias, like, utopias for black people. Um, and so I started searching, and my first thought was to look back in history. So like maybe something like a black Wall Street, but not quite a utopia. Um, and then I was like, alright, physical places that exist now. Maybe like a cult or an independent city, and in the research, I just didn't see it. Like, I even tried looking online, the internet, I couldn't really find anything.

But what I did find was this woman who tries to build a sort of utopia for herself and ends up with a lot of power, like so much power that she has to make a decision that's kinda crazy and that's what I wanted to know more about.

PJ: The story you ended up finding is like, I have never heard a story like this before. It's really, i dunno, I really like it. Do you wanna just take it away?

MACK: Yeah, I got it.

ALEX: Alright.

MACK: So, the story's about a woman named Autumn. She's 27, and she lives in L.A.
MACK: What do-what do you do? AUTUMN: Oh, I work as a special education aid in a special day class. So I work primarily with third, fourth and fifth graders with special needs. MACK: That sounds like a, a really like rewarding job. AUTUMN: (whispers) Yes! It really is. MACK: And so what makes you happy? AUTUMN: Wow, that's a deep question (laughs). MACK: (laughs) I mean, it can be as deep or lighthearted as you want it to be. AUTUMN: Um, what makes me happy is making other people happy. Like, that's the honest truth, I guess.
MACK: So the story starts when Autumn's 8 or 9, and her mom drags her to this baby shower-'cause, you know, sometimes your mom drags you to stuff that you really don't want to be at. And she's not alone because there's this other girl there that doesn't want to be there either, and the girl is like, "Hey! Like, come to my room. I have something I want to show you." And so they go. And the girl like boots up this computer. And there it is, this tiny world that Autumn's never seen before. The Sims.
MUSIC - (dorian) AUTUMN: And I watched her build a house and make these people and the people were talking and cooking and I was like, "Woah! It's like a dollhouse on a computer!" MACK: And so like, what did you like about the game when you first saw it? What was intriguing about it to you? AUTUMN: I liked that you could control little tiny people. She was kind of cruel, I guess, with them, like drowning them on purpose. But I, I liked the thought of being able to make all these little tiny people and they all live their own individual tiny lives. MACK: OK. And- and- around-around the time that you first started playing the game, how much time would you say you spent playing? AUTUMN: All the time. If I was not at school, I was playing. MACK: So you'd go to school- MACK: And then as soon as you- AUTUMN: Come home- AUTUMN: Yup. I got home and the second I got home the shoes were off, run upstairs, play the computer, get yelled at, do my homework, and then turn right around and keep playing.
MACK: Autumn told me that she would, for the most part, do anything to avoid life at home. Because like, her relationship with her mom was hard.
AUTUMN: Um, my mom worked as a teacher but she was for like upper grades. She was a teacher so she worked with kids all day and then she came home, and I guess coming home to a kid was a lot too. AUTUMN: Um, so if she wasn't, um, I guess, disciplining, then she was off by herself. Um, and there was no other parent in the equation. I know growing up I was really angry and resentful that everyone else seemed to have at least one parent that loved them, and I didn't.
MACK: So Autumn spends a lot of time at home by herself. And when she gets to school, things still feel like trash.
AUTUMN: When I went to school, it was in an area that was rough, right? Like, we would fight over like who could have the juice instead of having bad milk. And um, I was naively nice to the point where I was letting fifth graders kick me in the shins because they said it was a game. Um, and I would get bruises.
MACK: But there was one bright spot in her life, a person that loved her fiercely-her grandma.
[MUSIC] AUTUMN: I would get out of school early and she would pick me up. I lived like right around the corner. I lived a block away from the school, but she refused to let me walk....
MACK: Her grandma would do stuff for her, like take her to museums, spend days with her at the library and like cook her favourite foods.
MACK: What did your grandma look like? AUTUMN: She was a chunky, let's say, 5-foot-6? 5-foot-6 1/2 woman. Um, lighter skin. She always kept her hair pressed. Every single day she'd put the pressing comb on the stove and press her hair, even though that's not good for your hair. You don't press dirty hair. And she had an amazing smile. Like she had an episode, I guess, and then like one side of her face-like her mouth drooped, and she was really self-conscious about it. But she would still smile, and it was just the most beautiful smile in the world.
MACK: And Autumn knew no matter how bad her day was, her grandma would still be happy to listen to her.
MACK: Why do you think she cared so much? AUTUMN: I have no idea. Like, my brain want to say because she was my grandmother, but it's like people aren't nice just because someone's family. I guess she just wanted to let me have a really enriching and fulfilled life maybe, which is really good of her, but that's all I can think of. [MUSIC- The Size of Grace (Instrumental)]
MACK: So Autumn's grandma is just being kind to her. Like she's showing somebody, who really needs some love, some love and that's kind of what Autumn did when it came to her Sims.
AUTUMN: Logically, I knew it was a game, but at the same time, I was so invested in these people, and in what they did, it was like, "I can do this. I can be happy. I can do something. I can change things." And it gave me a sense of power that I guess I didn't have otherwise.
MACK: And so, in Autumn's Sims world like, her house would have white picket fences, grass that's just green and like manicured to hell, and a fridge full of food and there's a dad there. And like, it really takes a lot of work to do this shit. Like, I don't-I remember playing The Sims and not giving my Sims nearly this level of like attention to detail. But at 13, Autumn's like a pro at this.

And having this kind of generic, happy family life is what she needs. Like, yeah it's boring, but, like, inside this, like, house that she built for her Sims, there's a lot of love and support. And for a while that's the perfect escape.

But then something happens in Autumn's life that kind of changes everything. When Autumn's 15, her grandma was diagnosed with lung cancer, and they put her on hospice care.
AUTUMN: She was, like, you know, deteriorating. And we went to see her one more time and then we left. And I remember a couple of days after I told my mom, I really felt like I needed to see her, and my mom said, "No, we already said goodbye. We're not going back."
MACK: And then one day, her mom comes home from work and is basically just like, "Hey, Grandma died today."
[MUSIC - RAINBOW PUGS] AUTUMN: It was just kind of really casual almost. It felt so dry, how she told me.
MACK: So this is like, actually really traumatic for Autumn. Like, in her mind now, she's forced to kind of conjure up this idea of her grandma dying in this hospital, sad and like alone. And, to top it all off, her mom won't even really talk to her about it. And at this point, all she really has is The Sims. That's like her thing, right?

But now The Sims feels different. I kind of understand that, right? Like, have you ever just been doing something and then suddenly forget why you're doing it? Like, it just kind of starts to feel dumb? Yeah. Autumn had no idea what she was doing with The Sims, like, kind of playing with this like fake-ass family. So, she dumps it, like, fuck that. And she decides to replace it with a world that looks like her own, before her grandma died.
AUTUMN: I was like, "OK, well I just want to make my house again. I want to my actual real house that I live in. I want to make my family and all that stuff." And so I was building. And then, as I was building it, I made myself, and I made my mom, it's like "Well, I want my grandmother to be here. Because I miss her. And I don't have anything to really remember her by because we don't have a lot of pictures of her really either." AUTUMN: So, for me it was like, "OK, well, let me have her back. [MUSIC - "HAVE HER BACK"] I want her back. Let me make her be back." MACK: And what's the first step in making her? AUTUMN: Oh, let me think. The first step was making sure that I got her face looking as close as possible. AUTUMN: I like got rid of the hair. I made her bald, so I could see what I was doing. But I made sure that like I took a gross amount of time, like, shaping her eyes, her nose, her fac-like at best that I could remember. MACK: Got it. And then, and then like what were some of-like what were some of the other steps that you went through, after you got the face to a place that you felt comfortable with? AUTUMN: I made sure to give her her pearl earrings. AUTUMN: I gave her loves the outdoors. I gave her neat. I gave her hot headed. I can't- MACK: And what're these things that you're- AUTUMN: I think I gave her family oriented- MACK: What're these things that you're describing, the neat- AUTUMN: Oh, I'm sorry. They're traits. AUTUMN: So like they're things that are like part of your Sims' personality. AUTUMN: So it's like, if they're neat, then they will reflexively want to like clean up messes that they see, or they'll get freaked out if there's a mess. And I made her a natural cook --- that's what it was--because she made some good food. MACK: (chuckles) What kind of things did she make? AUTUMN: Oh my god! She would make bacon, like so much bacon. And like toast and eggs and it was all really good. She made yams. She made-(deep breath) god! She made greens, she made like black-eyed peas. She made so many things! She made cornbread-she made so much. I can't list everything that she made. AUTUMN: She made really good food (laughs). MACK: (laughs) I love how excited that you get about the food that she made. That lets me know that it was actually really good. AUTUMN: Oh her food was so good. Oh my god.
MACK: So, Autumn is doing all this work to kind of make this Sim feel and behave as realistically as possible. But it gets to a point where it's like, what's the point? Because the defaults that she's working with it's just, to be frank ... just white as hell. You know it's like it's the same five hairstyles that white people think all Black people have.

And so, Autumn really wants to make this thing real, but it's not real enough. But, Autumn being Autumn, she's not gonna settle until she gets it right. And then one day she finds this website called, The Black Simmer.
MUSIC (WANDER) YOUTUBER 1: I'm using a custom skin tone in my game, and this is the one right here. She also has-- YOUTUBER 2: Look at the, look, the hair, look at these earrings. Like what? Like look at, look! What is this!? Like, yo.
MACK: The Black Simmer is basically a place where black people who love The Sims come together and, I don't know, essentially modify the game. Like, they draw style inspiration from their own lives, like things they would actually wear, or like use, and then they upload it so other people can use it in the game.

YOUTUBER: If you can get it while you can, grab it, you guys. Like, I'm telling you, it's mad cute, so.
AUTUMN: Like before, The Black Simmer, like, there was no real custom content that I knew of that fit people that look like me, right? And my grandmother. Like it was just you deal with what you get, and if it doesn't fit, sucks. And then I found The Black Simmer. I'm like, "Wait a minute that skin color is my grandmother's skin color. Those glasses are my grandmother's glasses. That hair." They have church now. Like, people have made churches like with actual church events, and like the tin that's supposed to have butter cookies and it has sewing things in it instead. Or the, like big, I think it's Country Crock Butter thing, that has no butter. It has like leftovers from something else, like little touches like that. Or like a clock, a clock that is apparently not sold anymore but every single black household has had it before. Or like, this pan, like little things that are so culturally poignant. These things I could take and put in my grandmother's house and put it in her life and put on her and make her feel more solidified. So it's not just this casual memory of maybe my grandmother's house and maybe my grandmother. It's my grandmother. It's my grandmother's house. It's her memory that I can keep.
MACK: And so, Autumn needs to make one final tweak now. It's like this crazy tweak that you can only do in The Sims. But it's a tweak that makes sure that Autumn's grandma never gets any older.
AUTUMN: I turned off aging. Like I didn't want her to age. I left her be. And in my mind I was thinking, "OK, I can't actually have her back, but I can play through her still existing here. I'm not ready to let go yet, so I'm going to have her here and she's gonna be here until I'm ready." MACK: Mhm. So you have your grandma in the game now. And now it's like not possible for her to get older- AUTUMN: Right- MACK: It's not possible for her to pass away. AUTUMN: I can just have her. She's there for me. She's there. [MUSIC - Groove Instrumental - starts on "every single day"]
MACK: Every single day after school, Autumn is on a mission. And that mission is to get home as fast as she can to hang out with her grandma. So, she gets home. She probably flings that book bag off. And she's up the stairs to get into The Sims.

And there in the game, from the moment she logs in, the phone starts ringing.

See, Autumn had programmed her grandma to be family-oriented, so her grandma called all the time. And so like, she's watching her Sim on the phone with her grandma. She can see her Sim like smiling and like getting comfortable, sitting on the couch, kicking her legs up. You know, all the things you do when you're having a really good phone conversation.

And Autumn can't actually understand the conversation they're having because in the game Sims speak a made up language called Simlish. But for Autumn, it's like kind of therapeutic to be able to fill in the lines, and in her mind she's imagining her grandma's asking things like, "Hey, how was your day?" You know, "How's it going? I miss you."
MACK: And so, who did you tell that- did you-or did you tell anyone at all that you were recreating her in the game-? AUTUMN: I didn't tell. MACK: You didn't tell. AUTUMN: That was for me. It was specifically my thing for me. It was my-mine. Like that was one thing of her that was mine. I did not share it with anyone. I didn't show anyone, it was for me. It was mine.
MACK: And like, for a year, that felt good. Like, she could walk around in this Sims universe and just randomly run into her grandma in the park. Or she could like go visit her grandma at home where they could sit on this big wooden swing she had and just chill. Like, this is great, it's like perfect because like everything Autumn wants, right?

Well, Autumn started to notice that after a while she'd go into the game and it wasn't working as well as it used to. Like it just-it didn't make her happy anymore. And she starts to realize the problem. She just created a world where her grandma could never die, which meant she can't grieve. Which is like, what's the point? Like, this is already her reality.

And so that's what leads her to her big decision. She decides to go back into the settings of The Sims, and she turns time back on.
AUTUMN: I turned aging back on, and it was absolutely miserable. Like I felt awful because it was like you would see, like, the little-at 6 o'clock every day in the game, like the little age meter would move up a little bit. And it's like, well, we're that much closer to the end, that upset me because in my mind it's like, I don't want to lose her again. MACK: Mhm. OK. And so, you turn aging on in the game, you're playing with her and as you're continuing to play you're looking at the meter and it's, it's ticking. AUTUMN: Ticking. Yup. MACK: So- do-do you change the way that you play now that aging is turned on? [MUSIC] AUTUMN: Yeah, (sighs) by that time my Sim had grown up and had kids of her own, so then she was a great grandmother (sniffles) excuse me. And so I'd let, like, my kids go to her house, and I would go to visit her. It was like a big thing because now that I couldn't depend on just maybe seeing at-her in the park, like, two or three Sim weeks from then. It's like every moment was precious. AUTUMN: So like (sniffle), there was a thing that happened where my Sim had a toddler, right? And my grandmother was teaching my toddler how to walk, and so in the game you can like record-like they have home videos basically, but in games. You can record things that happen in the game and then still play them while you're in game, like on a TV. AUTUMN: Like a regular home video. I know those don't really exist too much anymore but, you know. And so I recorded my grandmother teaching my toddler to walk and for me that was, it was wild. Because it's something that I know that I'll never have. But it was so wild to see it happening. Like I wish, you know, I wish that she could be around to see things that. Or to like be around to see the birth of my first child, things like that. But I can't have that. So it was just, it was really good to be able to have it happen in a game, if anything. MACK: Why didn't you just decide to keep it off? You know, that would've been so much easier. Why did the-why did that realization make you feel like you had to like turn it on, wher-rather than just kind of continue to live in the fantasy? AUTUMN: I think that it was important for me to, like, see that life can continue past someone so important passing on. Does that make sense? I know it's like really convoluted and weird. AUTUMN: But that's not how life works, and I can't deny that that's not how life works. That's not healthy. MACK: Yeah. Could you tell me about the night or the day that your grandmother passes in The Sims? AUTUMN: It was hard. I signed in, like I got on the game, (sniffles) excuse me. And things were going pretty normally. I couldn't see her life thing because I was playing as me, but I could see mine moving, and it's like, "OK well if my life is progressing I know hers is too." And then eventually I got a notification in the top corner of my screen that said that her name, Grace, was going to pass soon, and if I had any business left to take care of it now (sniffles). I was terrified. Because it's like I can't- like- it-it wasn't initial shock of, I can't lose her again. I don't want to lose her. I want to turn off aging. I'm not ready. I'm-I can't do this. I want to keep her. I don't want to lose her again. But I had to pause the game, kind of walk away and think, it's like, well this is, this is life. This is what happens. And at least it's peaceful, and you're getting a warning, so go ahead and keep playing and just let what hap-what's going to happen, happen. So, I unpaused the game, and I moved her Sim out of her house into my house, so I could keep an eye on her. She got to be really comfortable in her last end game days. I let her go out and sit in the garden. We sat and we talked and then I saw that it was the very end of her life thing, like it was at the very end. There was no time left. It was going to be that day. So I didn't let my Sim go to work. I didn't let the kids go to school. No one went anywhere. Everyone stayed home with her. And then right on time, she just kind of, like, the, the camera like shot to her so you have to see it. And she just laid down and she-like it was kind of peace-it was really peaceful, like she just- she-she passed. Like there's this big, fancy luau-looking thing, like the Grim Reaper comes, and (sniffles) they just like nod in acceptance that it's their time. And they go, and it left behind, because it was inside, it left behind an urn. And all of my Sims start crying. And they're all bawling. And I'm crying (sniffles). I'm sorry. MACK: No, it's fine. It's fine. AUTUMN: (crying) Like I couldn't stop crying. But it still felt better for me, like as a person. It felt better to watch her pass in luxury knowing that she lived a long fulfilling life doing the things that she loved (sniffles). And there was no suffering and no pain. I could be there for her and would-gave her like hugs and kisses and everything. She wasn't by herself. Or she wasn't with some nurse that didn't really, like, get attached to her or anything. Like she was with family (crying). Like I spent a long time, like while I'm crying, this is my grieving process. I took the urn and put it outside to make sure it was a gravestone. And I put like so many flowers and trees around her, her grave.
MACK: In the weeks that come after this, Autumn keeps watching her Sims kind of process this, and she's seeing like her two kids they're like hugging and weeping and holding each other's faces and holding her. And she could log in and really see her family visiting her grandma's grave.
MACK: Do you think you could've processed this grief that you had associated like with the passing of your grandma in the same way without The Sims? AUTUMN: Heavens no, not a chance. I would still be sitting and thinking to myself, "My grandmother is sitting in the living room in her house." AUTUMN: I know that's not true, but that's what I grasped to, to like keep myself from melting, to like breaking down, was, "No, she's not actually gone. She's just sitting on the couch in her house, and she's just having a time and she doesn't have phone connection, and that's why she hasn't called. That's all it is." [MUSIC]
MACK: It's been 10 years since the funeral. And in that time, a lot of the things in Autumn's real life that made her need the Sims before don't really exist anymore. She's not in school being bullied by kids, she doesn't live with her mom anymore, and in fact, she like has a job and she has a partner. She has like actual power over her life.

She still sometimes misses her grandma, and when she does, she can't really bring herself to visit the actual grave. Like, she knows it's gonna be a mess, and it's possible she'll be the first person to ever visit it. And to Autumn, that's not the right way to remember her grandma.

So instead, she goes back to the game. And there, in the backyard of the house, one of the first things you'll see is this big wooden swing, and it's the swing that Autumn and her grandma used to hang out on. Then, exact opposite of the swing, you'll see this like huge plot of grass, and it's this really nice white slab of marble that's just like hanging in the shadows of a huge maple tree. And every year around her grandma's birthday or special holidays, that's where you'll find Autumn, crouched down, laying flowers at the head of her grandma's grave.

PJ: Reporter Wallace Mack. A version of the story you just heard originally appeared on The Nod. If you like our show and you haven't checked out The Nod, you're cheating yourself out of a lot of free joy, and I think that's a very strange choice.

We've talked about them on the show before, but like, The Nod, they're also at Gimlet. We love them. It's like our show in that it's sort of weird and hard to explain to people who aren't already listening, but I wanna give it a shot.

They cover black culture, like that's what they're interested in, and the show that they make, it's just like every week it is something entirely different and weird and fun and surprising. So like they'll have a story like the one you just heard, but then the next episode, they have this one, Peak Reality, where it's just Eric, one of the hosts, making this extremely funny and weirdly like kind of persuasive argument that 2016 was the absolute high water mark for reality TV.

And then you get an episode, they have one, Paradise Garage, where all the stories are set in this 1970s New York nightclub that was hidden in an old parking garage. They have this story called the Cowboy of the West Village, which is like I literally do not want to say a thing about it because it's just one of those things you just have to listen to. It's a complete surprise from the beginning to the end. Um, yeah, go check them out. They're on iTunes, The Nod.

OK, we'll have more of our show after the break.
BREAK
PJ: Welcome back to the show.

Uh, Alex?

ALEX GOLDMAN: Yes?

PJ: Can I tell you this thing I've been thinking about?

ALEX: Sure.

PJ: You remember when we did the call-in show? Where we took calls for 48 hours? I mean one of us did-

ALEX: Yeah I was about to correct you-

PJ: The other one slept a little it-

ALEX: Yes, I remember that.

PJ: Um, do you remember-so like the second night you actually did go to sleep and I stayed up.

ALEX: Yes.

PJ: And there was this one phone call I ended up having with a guy, I think he was from New Zealand. And like, by the time he called, I dunno it was like 4 o'clock in the morn-- it was really late. And I, like, I started to feel this, like, weird, like, abandoned on the moon astronaut feeling. Like I just felt very, even though like we were taking all these phone calls, it felt very isolated and bad.

ALEX: Totally, you're in like a tiny sealed box in an empty office--

PJ: And your co-host is asleep. But the thing about the New Zealand call was the way he described where he was, it felt like he was literally standing on the edge of the world.

ALEX: OK.

PJ: Like he just described the place he was as like so pretty and remote and like, and it felt nice to be talking to someone from the farthest possible point.

ALEX: Yeah, I mean that's sort of like, if I were to think of the utop-the utopian version of the Internet, that's it. It's like you get to talk to people who have, who are like at the literal furthest point from you with like the most diametrically opposed life that you, you can never touch. But then suddenly it-all distance is collapsed by this wonderful technology.

PJ: All right, Carl Sagan.

ALEX: (laughs) And in the beauty of the night sky.

PJ: No. Like I guess my question is just like, is there a point in your past, where you like, what's the time where you most remember that feeling of just being remote and isolated and just having a very thin line back to where life was?

ALEX: What you're describing sounds like the time I was committed to a mental hospital.

PJ: (laughs) That is an example of feeling isolated. Is it, is it okay if I ask you what happened?

ALEX: So this was like 15 years ago. Um--

PJ: This was when you were in Texas?

ALEX: This was when I was in Massachusetts. And um, I was just a person who was deeply chemically imbalanced and needed a lot of help, which I have since gotten. So like, I'm in good shape.

But being in a mental hospital feels remote because, um, you're trapped in a place with people you don't like. You have to sleep in a room with people you don't like because you don't, you don't get a room to yourself. You have no autonomy, can't shut a door.

And they have a phone. You can use it as much as you want. But they do this thing where they-this cruel thing-where they're like, "Listen, you know, if-what it tells us when you do this." Because like all you-all anybody wants in this position, which is like, you have no privacy, you're totally exposed. The-you're doing group therapy fifteen times a day to tear yourself apart and rebuild yourself as something that is like stable enough to walk out the doors.

PJ: (sighs)

ALEX: So you can use the phone whenever you want but what they say is like, "Listen what you're telling us when you use the phone all the time is that you're not ready to leave here."

PJ: (breathes) Oh!

ALEX: That's the most isolated I've ever felt, I guess.

PJ: What did you-what was your little straw to see the world through? Like was it the phone?

ALEX: Basically. Um, I was like trying to-I was just like trying to find-those moments when you're like desperately alone, and you need someone who understands what you're going through.

And so you just keep like, so, I feel like this was a very common experience in college, where you're just-where I was just like calling and calling and calling people from my dorm room being like, "I just need you to understand me. I just need you to understand me."

Just magnify that a hundred times when you're in the mental hospital. And it also happened to be the weekend of my grandmother on my mom's side's funeral. And I called my mom and I was like, "Hey, I can't come I'm in a mental hospital. I need you to understand me."

PJ: What did she say?

ALEX: She was like, "I can't believe you'd fucking do this."

PJ: (laughs)

ALEX: And I was like, "Well, I didn't exactly-I did get committed so."

PJ: I bet your mom feels so bad about that.

ALEX: She's going to when she hears this!

PJ: (laughs) So like, I don't know, this is like weird, and I don't know if it'll work but like, it's like every once in awhile there have been these moments where actually it's like instead of us just yammering forever, it's like we'll hear from people who normally have to listen.

Like, with the call-in show it happened a bunch of times, where it would be like, all of a sudden it was like on a dock under some stars in the Midwest, you know what I mean? Or like we were like in a dorm room in a weird dorm room fight. I guess I just want, I just, I want that feeling, like--basically like the dream version is somebody's like, um, "I'm on an oil rig in deep space. And this is where I'm recording from."

ALEX: I'm sorry. An oil rig in deep space?

PJ: Isn't that a thing in some sci-fi movie? I don't know. What do they mine in space?

ALEX: Unobtainium.

PJ: OK. I'm in an unobtainium mine in deep space. And I listen to the podcast, and this is my like mining hole.

ALEX: You want like the, the John Cage four minutes and thirty-three seconds-

PJ: No, it doesn't have to be silent. Like, I actually would be totally happy if people were like, "Here's why it feels like how it feels out here." But I just want to feel the sense of like, you like send audio out and like it usually doesn't come back. And I want to see the farthest places it comes back from.

ALEX: I like that idea.

PJ: Basically I just want clips where it's like people saying like where they are, what they're seeing there and how it feels to be there. And maybe like actually like a minute of the sound of that place.

ALEX: Mhm. Just to be clear, unobtainium is really only on the planet of Pandora.

PJ: What is unobtainium from? Avatar?

ALEX: Avatar.

PJ: How are you pulling Avatar references?

ALEX: I gotta be honest. Today I was thinking about how after that movie came out there were all those articles about people who saw the movie and then became depressed because Pandora seemed so utopian (PJ laughs) that they like got in forums and were just like, "God I wish I could just be one of those blue guys."

PJ: That was a thing?

ALEX: I mean, I don't think it was a real-I think like one person said it on a forum, and it became an, an article on a hundred different news outlets.

PJ: That's such a sweet expression of being very depressed.

ALEX: (laughs)
[MUSIC]
PJ: OK, if people have stuff. What's the email address that we tell people to send emails to?

ALEX: Well, there's replyall@gimletmedia.com. Is that what we want to use?

PJ: What's your personal one though?

ALEX: (laughs) Ok. So send your recordings - just about a minute or so - to replyall@gimletmedia.com subject line: Unobtainium.
[MUSIC] [REPLY ALL THEME]
PJ: Reply All is hosted by me, PJ Vogt, and Alex Goldman. Our show is produced by Sruthi Pinnamaneni, Phia Bennin, Damiano Marchetti, Anna Foley and Jessica Yung. The show's edited by Tim Howard. This week we had more editing help from Emanuele Berry. Our intern is Heather Schröering. And the show is mixed by Rick Kwan, fact-checking by Michelle Harris.

Special thanks Amira Virgil, founder of The Black Simmer, and to The Nod. Again go check them out. We have links to all the episodes that I mentioned in our show notes. You can go right from there.

Our theme song is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. There are actually a lot of additional music credits for this episode. You can find them on our website, replyall.limo.

Matt Lieber is a long drive at night.

You can find more episodes of the show on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.

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REPLY ALL THEME] PJ VOGT: From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vogt. ALEX GOLDMAN: And I'm Alex Goldman. And today, we have, uh, Wallace Mack in the studio. MACK: What's up, y'all? PJ: Hey, Mack. You have a story for us today. MACK: I do, I do.

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Clip from Star Trek: Next Generations, "The Measure of a Man"

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Clip from Star Trek: Next Generations, "The Measure of a Man"

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Data is a robot, FYI

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Star Trek: The Next Generation - Sentient Being

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"Ghost in the Machine" - This American Life, Episode 757

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"Ghost in the Machine" - This American Life, Episode 757

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People use machines to find what they lost

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A version of the painting His Master's Voice by Francis Barraud, which was adapted into a logo for RCA Victor

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There's one thing that has been proven to cut the achievement gap between black and white students by half: integration.

The story of one man's journey from obscurity to international professional celebrity.

There's one thing that has been proven to cut the achievement gap between black and white students by half: integration.

The story of one man's journey from obscurity to international professional celebrity.

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The Ghost in the Machine - This American Life

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People use machines to find people they lost.

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"A Song on the End of the World" - Czeslaw Milosz

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"A Song on the End of the World" - Czeslaw Milosz

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On the day the world ends

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends

Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder

And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born

No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

There will be no other end of the world,

There will be no other end of the world.

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A Song on the End of the World by Czeslaw Milosz | Poetry Foundation

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On the day the world ends A fisherman mends a glimmering net. Happy porpoises jump in the sea, By the rainspout young sparrows are playing And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

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The speaker, Eve, talks to her daughters of her and Adam's fall from Eden. She continues to talk about Adam's quest to become god-like, outlining his arrogance, and Eve stays submissive and loyal despite his flaws.

First published in The Other Half : Poems Judith Wright , Sydney : Angus and Robertson, 1966

Image credits: Profile photo - The Judith Wright Centre http://judithwrightcentre.com/who-was-judith-wright
Banner - Caleigh Andrews, a Haiku Deck presentation https://www.haikudeck.com/presentations/Qy9v6KsgUL

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The speaker, Eve, talks to her daughters of her and Adam's fall from Eden. She continues to talk about Adam's quest to become god-like, outlining his arrogance, and Eve stays submissive and loyal despite his flaws.

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'Fire and Ice' is one of the best-known and most widely anthologised poems by the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). The poem has a symbolic, even allegorical quality to it, which makes more sense when it is analysed in its literary and historical context. Frost wrote 'Fire and Ice' in 1920, and it was published in Harper's Magazine in December of that year. You can read 'Fire and Ice' here before proceeding to our analysis of the poem below.

The elements of fire and ice mentioned in the poem, and foregrounded in its title, are two of the four Aristotelian or classical elements, along with earth and air (although 'ice' is usually just described as water, Frost - whose very surname here summons the icy conditions of one half of the poem - is purposely summoning these classical elements).

In summary, 'Fire and Ice' is a nine-line poem in which Frost tells us that he has heard some people say that the world will end in fire, while others reckon it will end in ice. In other words, the world will either burn up or freeze up. Frost's speaker goes on to assert that his own view is that fire is more likely, especially in light of his experiences of desire (which is often linked with fire and heat, e.g. we talk of 'burning with desire' for someone). However, ice comes a close second for him: he's also experienced enough of the destructive power of cold, icy hatred to see how that might consume the world, too, and be sufficient to destroy it.

We said that fire and ice are perhaps more allegorical than symbolic in Frost's poem, because rather than leaving these deeply symbolic forces of fire and ice open to speculation and different interpretations, he goes on to link them very specifically to two particular emotions: desire for fire, and hate for ice. In other words, will humans destroy the world through hating each other so much that we all kill each other? Or will passionate desire actually destroy everything?

In other words, what begins in rather elemental, open-ended terms (perhaps even inviting us to think of global warming, something unknown to Frost, when we read of the world ending in fire) comes to have a distinctly human aspect, grounded in human emotions and behaviour.

What makes 'Fire and Ice' such a haunting and even troubling poem is its acknowledgment that desire and passion can be more deadly and destructive than mere hate: hate ('ice') may well consume us all through war (we need only look at how religious and political differences can make whole groups of people hate their neighbours), but desire ('fire') may prove even more powerful because it can provide the zeal, the irrational belief in something, that will fuel even more destructive behaviour.

Frost wrote 'Fire and Ice' in 1920. This is just two years after the end of the First World War, and a time when revolution, apocalypse, and social and political chaos were on many people's minds. And especially on poets' minds. A year earlier, W. B. Yeats had written 'The Second Coming', with its famous declaration, ' Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ', and its assertion that a 'second coming' must be 'at hand', with some sphinx-like creature slowly making its way towards Bethlehem to be born as a second Christ.

Five years after Frost wrote 'Fire and Ice', T. S. Eliot would offer his own version of apocalypse in 'The Hollow Men' (1925): ' This is the way the world ends ', he says, famously, 'Not with a bang but a whimper.' 'Fire and Ice' should be seen in the broader literary context of these 'apocalyptic' poems.

'Fire and Ice' was supposedly the inspiration for the title of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and lends a curiously apocalyptic meaning to Game of Thrones. Will the world end in fire or ice? This idea of one world coming to an end and another, potentially, being born, is obviously also an important context for Robert Frost's poem: the idea of an old world order giving way to a new was 'in the air' when he wrote the poem.
About Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. And yet he didn't belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language. He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist poets, that it was 'like playing tennis with the net down'.

Many of his poems are about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring prominently in some of his most famous and widely anthologised poems ('The Road Not Taken', 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening', 'Birches', 'Tree at My Window'). Elsewhere, he was fond of very short and pithy poetic statements: see 'Fire and Ice' and 'But Outer Space', for example.

Robert Frost was invited to read a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. However, as he prepared to read the poem he had written specially for the occasion, 'For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration', Frost found he was unable to read the words of his poem on the paper, so bright was the glare of the sun. So instead, he began to recite one of his earlier poems, from memory: 'The Gift Outright'. Most critics agree that 'The Gift Outright' is a superior poem to the inauguration poem Frost had written, and 'The Gift Outright' is now more or less synonymous with Kennedy's inauguration.

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A Short Analysis of Robert Frost's 'Fire and Ice'

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'Fire and Ice' is one of the best-known and most widely anthologised poems by the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). The poem has a symbolic, even allegorical quality to it, which makes more sense when it is analysed in its literary and historical context. Frost wrote 'Fire and Ice' in 1920, and it was published...

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats | Poetry Foundation

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

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One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
He called Alice, when she was just small

When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the Dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head

Lyrics submitted by kevin, edited by ILoveMyCat

White Rabbit Lyrics as written by Grace Wing Slick

Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Lyrics powered by LyricFind

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Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit Lyrics | SongMeanings

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One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has

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, followed in November of the same year. But our favorite is still the original, when we're first introduced to Neo, Morpheus, and the truth about spoons. Here we go down the rabbit hole to the stories behind 14 mind-twisting terms from Matrix Reloaded, the second film in trilogy, kung-fu'd its way into theaters 13 years ago this month. The conclusion, The Matrix Revolutions The Matrix.

"The Matrix has you," Neo's computer tells him. What is the Matrix exactly? In the movie, it's a virtual reality (VR) world into which people are plugged while their bodies are used for energy by a race of artificially intelligent beings.

The word matrix originated in the 15th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and referred to the womb (echoing the womb-like pods Neo and the others are kept in). The science fiction meaning, basically the equivalent of cyberspace, might have been coined in a 1976 episode of Doctor Who, "Deadly Assassin": "How can you intercept thought patterns within the matrix itself?"

The matrix as a VR-world might have first appeared in the 1984 novel by William Gibson, The Neuromancer: "He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high ... jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix."

Neo has a couple of meanings. It's an anagram for "one," as in the One who will save humanity, and also means "new" as in the new, freshly-born person now aware of the Matrix.

The name Thomas Anderson also has significance. comes from an Aramaic word that means "twin." Agent Smith tells Neo, "It seems that you have been living two lives," one as program writer Thomas Anderson and the other as hacker Neo. Thomas might also refer to doubting Thomas, the apostle who refused to believe in Jesus's resurrection until he fingered the wounds himself. As for Anderson, it means "son of man," perhaps to emphasize Neo's humanity.

Metacortex is the software company that Neo works for. Meta- is a combining element that means "changed" or "higher, beyond." Cortex refers to the outer layer of an organ, in this case the brain. Metacortex could imply the idea of a higher intelligence, like that of robots and computer programs, or a higher consciousness, like that which Neo achieves in order to realize the true nature of the Matrix.

The word trinity is commonly thought of in the Christian theological sense of the existence of God in three persons. Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity might be considered embodiments of those three persons, with Morpheus as the Father ("Morpheus, you were more than a leader," Tank says, "you were a father"), Neo as the Son or Christ-like figure ("You are my Savior, man!" Choi tells him, "my own personal Jesus Christ!"), and Trinity as the Holy Spirit who helps Neo come back from the dead.

Neo's computer advises him to "follow the white rabbit," a reference to the tardy rabbit which leads Lewis Carroll's Alice down the rabbit hole and to her adventures in Wonderland. In the film, the white rabbit appears in the form of a tattoo on the shoulder of a woman, who Neo follows to a club where he meets Trinity.

While the OED's "official" definition of white rabbit is a person or thing that hurries from place to place, it might also refer to something that leads one on (mis)adventures. In the 1930s, rabbit hole gained the figurative sense of a passage leading to a surreal or nonsensical place.

In ancient Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses, Morpheus is the god of dreams while his name translates from Greek as "maker of shapes." In the film, Morpheus is a legendary hacker who expertly manipulates the Matrix and helps Neo realize the Matrix is basically a dream.

"Take the blue pill and the story ends," Morpheus tells Neo. "Take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

An influence on the blue and red pills of The Matrix might have been Douglas R. Hofstadter's 1979 book,Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in which a tortoise and the philosopher Aristotle drink phials of blue and red liquid to "pop" in and out of M.C. Escher's labyrinthic drawings. The drinking of the phials-like the taking of the pills in The Matrix -is reminiscent of Alice's drinking a bottle labeled "DRINK ME" and eating a cake tagged "EAT ME," which cause her to shrink and grow, respectively.

In Matrix parlance, redpills are those who are aware of the Matrix construct while bluepills are not.

Morpheus's ship, Nebuchadnezzar or "Neb" for short, is named for Nebuchadnezzar II, the ancient Babylonian king who was said to have troubling dreams he couldn't remember. In Matrix Reloaded, Morpheus quotes the Bible as the Neb is destroyed: "I have dreamed a dream; but now that dream is gone from me."

Zion is the last human city, says Tank, hidden "deep underground ... near the earth's core." Like the Matrix, the idea of Zion might have been plucked from The Neuromancers, in which Zion is a space settlement built by Rastafarians. The original Zion was an ancient Hebraic city often used as a synonym for Jerusalem.

The Oracle is a sentient program, but unlike the Agents, is on the side of the humans. She's believed to be precognitive, but it's unclear if she's simply telling people what they want to hear. The name Oracle could be a play on the Oracle computer company.

Cypher is a Neb crew member furtively in cahoots with the Agents. The word cypher, or cipher, has multiple meanings. Its oldest definition is the numeral zero, and perhaps by extension, a person of little worth. Cipher eventually came to mean any number, and then a disguised way of writing, perhaps because early codes often replaced letters with numbers. In the movie, Cypher is an expert at reading Matrix code and is himself coded or disguised.

Matrix digital rain is the code for the Matrix that rains down on various computer screens. The characters are a combination of Latin letters, numbers, and Japanese katakana characters. The Hungarian film is said to be an influence, as well as the opening credits for Ghost in the Shell, a Japanese anime film based on the manga of the same name and an influence on the film in general.

While this special effect didn't originate with The Matrix, the term bullet time might have. A March 1999 Variety article about the movie mentions "bullet-time photography," in which "ultra-fast lensing" is used in combination with "computer enhancement" to alter "the speed and trajectories of people and objects." The first instance of bullet time (not-so-)special effects might be in the 1962 movie Zotz!, in a which a nutty professor uses an ancient amulet to stop a bullet.

In wire fu, a blend of "wire" and "kung fu," wires are used in fight scenes to give the illusion of flight. While the term first appeared in the mainstream in 1997, says Word Spy, Hong Kong action star Jet Li is credited with pioneering the technique in films such as Once Upon a Time in China.

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Go down the rabbit hole to the stories behind these terms from the movie.

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The Matrix remains one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, but what are the deeper meanings behind the names of its classic characters? The Wachowski sisters, when writing the movie, wanted to have the names of each character to be reflective of larger themes of the story and what the individual's roles are in the overall narrative. Some of these naming details are well known but others are more obscure.

The Matrix was released over twenty years ago, and quickly became one of the most influential and important Hollywood films of the 21st century. It follows a computer hacker named Neo who discovers that the world is actually a computer simulation, and he joins a band of freedom fighters who battle against the machines who have enslaved the human race. By combining layered theming and expert filmmaking craft the Wachowski sisters were able to create a fresh take on the classic hero's journey, and even after so many years people are still able to find new meanings in the original text.

Related: The Matrix 4 Theory: Morpheus Returns As The Movie's Villain

One of the central themes of The Matrix is that of identity, and so the names of the characters often play into this theme. Especially since the Wachowskis have since come out as trans women, and The Matrix became reframed as a subtle trans narrative, characters' names and the ways in which they assert their own identities within the spaces they inhabit have gained even more meaning. The names of the characters reflect these identities, along with being references to various influences, character traits, and real world places and people.

Neo

Neo is the protagonist of the film, and is first introduced to the audience as Thomas Anderson. Neo is the name he chooses for himself as a computer hacker, and reflects how he truly sees himself. The crew of the Nebuchadnezzar respects him and calls him Neo, whereas Agent Smith continuously dead names him and calls him Mr. Anderson. It's well known that Neo works as an anagram for the One, which reflects Neo's ultimate fate as being the One. It's also the latin name for new, which could be a nod to the fact that Neo is newly stepping into the world outside the Matrix, and is the audience surrogate for learning about how this world works. On top of all these, his name also draws inspiration from the Chicago nightclub Neo, which was both a notably gay-friendly club and a haven for the goth subculture of the '80s and '90s, which made it a common spot for the Wachowskis in their younger years.

Morpheus

Morpheus is Neo's mentor in the film, and the one who most zealously believes in the prophecy of the One. His name comes from the greek god of sleep, also called Morpheus. The god Morpheus lived in a dream world with his family, and this mythology is paralleled in simulated world of The Matrix. Morpheus offers Neo the chance to wake up in the famous red pill/blue pill scene, and his dialogue often features the terms dream, sleep, and wake. The Wachowski sisters drew inspiration from many different sources for their film, so they also told Laurence Fishburne to base his performance on Morpheus from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series of comics. Sandman is another series that features dreams and sleeping as major motifs.

Trinity

Trinity is Neo's love interest and fellow hovercraft crew member, and is the one who initially draws Neo into the real world. Trinity is another religious reference, this time to ideas within Christian theology. The concept of the trinity revolves around the idea of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost simultaneously being separate entities while also being a single entity, that of God. Trinity choosing this name for herself could reflect her mysterious nature at the beginning of the film, or that she views herself in a multifaceted way, both with a life in the Matrix and a life in the real world. It could also be another expression of the Wachowski's secret (at the time) struggle with gender identity, with the idea of being different people in one body being at the forefront of their minds. The religious parallels don't stop here either, as she is both Neo's salvation from life in the Matrix and also the one who raises him from the dead at the end of the film.

Related: Who Is The Matrix 4's Villain? Every Candidate Theory Explained

Cypher

Another crew member of the Nebuchadnezzar, Cyphus ultimately betrayed Morpheus and the rest of humanity in exchange for a comfortable life in the Matrix. His name is indicative of this, as a cypher is a word used for a secret code, often used by spies in times of war. Cypher himself is a spy for the machines in their war against the humans. His name could also have a double meaning; when someone refers to a person as a cypher, they often mean that person has a certain unknowable quality to them. The entire crew of the hovercraft lived with Cypher and thought of him as one of their own. They never suspected how much he resented them and regretted not taking the blue pill. They never truly knew him.

Agent Smith

Agent Smith's name may seem pretty generic, but it too is reflective of the larger themes of the film's story. Smith is a computer program that acts as an enforcer for the machines that control the Matrix and keep the enslaved humans in line and obedient. As such, he serves as a representation of oppressive systems in general and the ways they can stifle a person's sense of freedom to live their life the way they choose. He's depicted as a faceless government agent for this exact reason, but he is just as well a stand-in for the police, the military, white supremacy, capital, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity, traditional gender roles, etc. For any system that seeks to control a population and insist the world is meant to be a certain way, Smith serves as the boot on the people's collective neck. The generic name of Agent Smith is a way of casting him as a small part in these larger systems, and as a coded straight white and male part as well.

Switch

Many of the names of other characters in the films tend to have less of a deeper meaning to them, i.e. Dozer is called Dozer because he's a big guy and Mouse is called Mouse because he's a little guy, etc. There is one more interesting bit of naming trivia, and that's with the character of Switch. The Wachowski sisters originally imagined Switch as a character who would be male in the real world and female in the Matrix. This would have been an interesting play on the story's larger ideas of identity and self image. It must also have been another expression of the Wachowski's explorations of gender, and would've reinforced the subtle trans narrative already present in the final film. Alas, the studio wouldn't allow them to do this so instead the Wachowskis opted to make the character androgynous as a nod to this original concept.

The names in The Matrix are filled with just as much meaning as everything else in the film. The Wachowski sisters took in all of their interests, politics, and personal struggles and blended them into a truly great science fiction film; one that's left an indelible mark on the pop culture of the 21st century.

Next: Matrix 4 vs. Dune: Which Film Will Win 2021's Sci-Fi Movie Battle

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The Matrix: What Each Character's Name Really Means

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The Matrix remains one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, but what are the deeper meanings behind the names of its classic characters? The Wachowski sisters, when writing the movie, wanted to have the names of each character to be reflective of larger themes of the story and what the individual's roles are in the overall narrative.

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"San Junipero" - Episode from Black Mirror
If you can find this it's good.

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Black Mirror is back with a new season on Netflix, and you might as well jump right to the best episode of the bunch. Gugu Mbatha-Raw ( Beyond the Lights) and Mackenzie Davis ( Halt and Catch Fire) star as two young women who meet in the seaside town of San Junipero.

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Benedetta Caponi  - 1936 - "Gianna Caproni"

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Benedetta Caponi  - 1936 - "Gianna Caproni"

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Benedetta Cappa - "Gianni Caproni" - 1936

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The Surreal Photography of Erik Johansson

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The Surreal Photography of Erik Johansson

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Website of Swedish photographer Erik Johansson

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OpenAI’s new chatbot is a coder, a teacher, a potential Google killer, and … a friend?

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This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s, "No Fear Shakespeare" puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they're on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written.

Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether-and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.

If you're looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life-and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators-is about to drastically change.

I teach a variety of humanities classes (literature, philosophy, religion, history) at a small independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. My classes tend to have about 15 students, their ages ranging from 16 to 18. This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held. I recognize that it's a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I'm sure you will be absolutely shocked to hear that not all teenagers are, in fact, so interested in having their mind lit on fire by Anzaldúa's radical ideas about transcending binaries, or Ishmael's metaphysics in Moby-Dick.

To those students, I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill-whether it's for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss.
Read: The college essay is dead
I've also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them-that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience's expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people's ears and things.

I don't know if either of those things is true anymore. It's no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation.

Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I've given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot's results don't exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.

I mean, look at this: I asked the program to write me a playful, sophisticated, emotional 600-word college-admissions essay about how my experience volunteering at my local SPCA had prepared me for the academic rigor of Stanford. Here's an excerpt from its response:

In addition to cleaning, I also had the opportunity to interact with the animals. I was amazed at the transformation I saw in some of the pets who had been neglected or abused. With patience and care, they blossomed into playful and affectionate companions who were eager to give and receive love. I was also able to witness firsthand the process of selecting the right pet for the right family. Although it was bittersweet to see some animals leave the shelter, I knew that they were going to a loving home, and that was the best thing for them.

It also managed to compose a convincing 400-word "friendly" cover letter for an application to be a manager at Starbucks. But most jaw-dropping of all, on a personal level: It made quick work out of an assignment I've always considered absolutely "unhackable." In January, my junior English students will begin writing an independent research paper, 12 to 18 pages, on two great literary works of their own choosing-a tradition at our school. Their goal is to place the texts in conversation with each other and find a thread that connects them. Some students will struggle to find any way to bring them together. We spend two months on the paper, putting it together piece by piece.

I've fed GPT a handful of pairs that students have worked with in recent years: Beloved and Hamlet, The Handmaid's Tale and The Parable of the Sower, Homer's The Odyssey and Dante's Inferno. GPT brought them together instantly, effortlessly, uncannily: memory, guilt, revenge, justice, the individual versus the collective, freedom of choice, societal oppression. The technology doesn't go much beyond the surface, nor does it successfully integrate quotations from the original texts, but the ideas presented were on-target-more than enough to get any student rolling without much legwork.

It goes further. Last night, I received an essay draft from a student. I passed it along to OpenAI's bots. "Can you fix this essay up and make it better?" Turns out, it could. It kept the student's words intact but employed them more gracefully; it removed the clutter so the ideas were able to shine through. It was like magic.

I've been teaching for about 12 years: first as a TA in grad school, then as an adjunct professor at various public and private universities, and finally in high school. From my experience, American high-school students can be roughly split into three categories. The bottom group is learning to master grammar rules, punctuation, basic comprehension, and legibility. The middle group mostly has that stuff down and is working on argument and organization-arranging sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within an essay. Then there's a third group that has the luxury of focusing on things such as tone, rhythm, variety, mellifluence.

Whether someone is writing a five-paragraph essay or a 500-page book, these are the building blocks not only of good writing but of writing as a tool, as a means of efficiently and effectively communicating information. And because learning writing is an iterative process, students spend countless hours developing the skill in elementary school, middle school, high school, and then finally (as thousands of underpaid adjuncts teaching freshman comp will attest) college. Many students (as those same adjuncts will attest) remain in the bottom group, despite their teachers' efforts; most of the rest find some uneasy equilibrium in the second category.

Working with these students makes up a large percentage of every English teacher's job. It also supports a cottage industry of professional development, trademarked methods buried in acronyms ( ICE! PIE! EDIT! MEAT!), and private writing tutors charging $100-plus an hour. So for those observers who are saying, Well, good, all of these things are overdue for change -"this will lead to much-needed education reform," a former colleague told me-this dismissal elides the heavy toll this sudden transformation is going to take on education, extending along its many tentacles (standardized testing, admissions, educational software, etc.).

Perhaps there are reasons for optimism, if you push all this aside. Maybe every student is now immediately launched into that third category: The rudiments of writing will be considered a given, and every student will have direct access to the finer aspects of the enterprise. Whatever is inimitable within them can be made conspicuous, freed from the troublesome mechanics of comma splices, subject-verb disagreement, and dangling modifiers.

But again, the majority of students do not see writing as a worthwhile skill to cultivate-just like I, sitting with my coffee and book, rereading Moby-Dick, do not consider it worthwhile to learn, say, video editing. They have no interest in exploring nuance in tone and rhythm; they will forever roll their eyes at me when I try to communicate the subtle difference, when writing an appositive phrase, between using commas, parentheses, or (the connoisseur's choice) the em dash.

Which is why I wonder if this may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence. After all, what is a cover letter? Its primary purpose isn't to communicate "I already know how to do this job" (because of course I don't) but rather "I am competent and trustworthy and can clearly express to you why I would be a good candidate for this job." What is a written exam? Its primary signal isn't "I memorized a bunch of information" but rather "I can express that information clearly in writing." Many teachers have reacted to ChatGPT by imagining how to give writing assignments now-maybe they should be written out by hand, or given only in class-but that seems to me shortsighted. The question isn't "How will we get around this?" but rather "Is this still worth doing?"

I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us? Is this moment more like the invention of the calculator, saving me from the tedium of long division, or more like the invention of the player piano, robbing us of what can be communicated only through human emotion?

Maybe the moment when I felt most caught between these two thoughts was when I asked GPT a question from an exam I give in my Eastern-philosophy course, something I've never imagined a student could find outside assistance to answer: "Explain the Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence, using a funny, specific example."

ChatGPT wrote back, as ever, instantly:

The Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence can be illustrated with a funny example: let's say you have a pet hamster. You might think that your hamster has its own inherent existence, but in reality, your hamster is made up of many different elements such as its fur, its bones, its muscles, and its brain. None of these elements exist independently or inherently on their own, so your hamster itself does not have any inherent existence either. The same goes for all phenomena-everything is made up of various components that don't have inherent existence, so nothing has any inherent existence either.

Everything is made up; it's true. The essay as a literary form? Made up. Grammatical rules as markers of intelligence? Writing itself as a technology? Made up. Starting now, OpenAI is forcing us to ask foundational questions about whether any of those things are worth keeping around.

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great literary works of their own choosing

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I've been teaching English for 12 years, and I'm astounded by what ChatGPT can produce.

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Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.

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Games have long been a proving ground for new AI advancements - from Deep Blue's victory over chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, to AlphaGo's mastery of Go, to Pluribus out-bluffing the best humans in poker. But truly useful, versatile agents will need to go beyond just moving pieces on a board. Can we build more effective and flexible agents that can use language to negotiate, persuade, and work with people to achieve strategic goals similar to the way humans do?

Today, we're announcing a breakthrough toward building AI that has mastered these skills. We've built an agent - CICERO - that is the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the popular strategy game Diplomacy*. CICERO demonstrated this by playing on webDiplomacy.net, an online version of the game, where CICERO achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10 percent of participants who played more than one game.

Diplomacy has been viewed for decades as a near-impossible grand challenge in AI because it requires players to master the art of understanding other people's motivations and perspectives; make complex plans and adjust strategies; and then use natural language to reach agreements with other people, convince them to form partnerships and alliances, and more. CICERO is so effective at using natural language to negotiate with people in Diplomacy that they often favored working with CICERO over other human participants.

Unlike games like Chess and Go, Diplomacy is a game about people rather than pieces. If an agent can't recognize that someone is likely bluffing or that another player would see a certain move as aggressive, it will quickly lose the game. Likewise, if it doesn't talk like a real person -- showing empathy, building relationships, and speaking knowledgeably about the game -- it won't find other players willing to work with it.

The key to our achievement was developing new techniques at the intersection of two completely different areas of AI research: strategic reasoning, as used in agents like AlphaGo and Pluribus, and natural language processing, as used in models like GPT-3, BlenderBot 3, LaMDA, and OPT-175B. CICERO can deduce, for example, that later in the game it will need the support of one particular player, and then craft a strategy to win that person's favor - and even recognize the risks and opportunities that that player sees from their particular point of view.

We've open-sourced the code and published a paper to help the wider AI community use CICERO to spur further progress in human-AI cooperation. You can also visit the CICERO website to learn more about the project and see the agent in action. Interested researchers can submit a proposal to the CICERO RFP to gain access to the data.

Under the hood: How we built CICERO

At the heart of CICERO is a controllable dialogue model for Diplomacy coupled with a strategic reasoning engine. At each point in the game, CICERO looks at the game board and its conversation history, and models how the other players are likely to act. It then uses this plan to control a language model that can generate free-form dialogue, informing other players of its plans and proposing reasonable actions for the other players that coordinate well with them.

Controllable dialogue

To build a controllable dialogue model, we started with a 2.7 billion parameter BART-like language model pre-trained on text from the internet and fine tuned on over 40,000 human games on webDiplomacy.net. We developed techniques to automatically annotate messages in the training data with corresponding planned moves in the game, so that at inference time we can control dialogue generation to discuss specific desired actions for the agent and its conversation partners. For example, if our agent is playing as France, conditioning the dialogue model on a plan involving England supporting France into Burgundy might yield a message to England like, "Hi England! Are you willing to support me into Burgundy this turn?" Controlling generation in this manner allows Cicero to ground its conversations in a set of plans that it develops and revises over time to better negotiate. This helps the agent coordinate with and persuade other players more effectively.

Step 1 Using the board state and current dialogue, Cicero makes an initial prediction of what everyone will do.

Step 2 CICERO iteratively refines that prediction using planning and then uses those predictions to form an intent for itself and its partner.

Step 3 It generates several candidate messages based on the board state, dialogue, and its intents.

Step 4 It filters the candidate message to reduce nonsense, maximize value, and ensure consistency with our intents.

We further improve dialogue quality using several filtering mechanisms - such as classifiers trained to distinguish between human and model-generated text - that ensure that our dialogue is sensible, consistent with the current game state and previous messages, and strategically sound.

Dialogue-aware strategy & planning

Past superhuman agents in adversarial games like chess, Go, and poker were created through self-play reinforcement learning (RL) - having the agents learn optimal policies by playing millions of games against other copies of itself. However, games involving cooperation require modeling what humans will actually do in real life, rather than modeling what they should do if they were perfect copies of the bot. In particular, we want CICERO to make plans that are consistent with its dialogue with other players.

The classic approach to human modeling is supervised learning, where the agent is trained with labeled data such as a database of human players' actions in past games. However, relying purely on supervised learning to choose actions based on past dialogue results in an agent that is relatively weak and highly exploitable. For example, a player could tell the agent, "I'm glad we agreed that you will move your unit out of Paris!" Since similar messages appear in the training data only when an agreement was reached, the agent might indeed move its unit out of Paris even if doing so is a clear strategic blunder.

To fix this, CICERO runs an iterative planning algorithm that balances dialogue consistency with rationality. The agent first predicts everyone's policy for the current turn based on the dialogue it has shared with other players, and also predicts what other players think the agent's policy will be. It then runs a planning algorithm we developed called piKL, which iteratively improves these predictions by trying to choose new policies that have higher expected value given the other players' predicted policies, while also trying to keep the new predictions close to the original policy predictions. We found that piKL better models human play and leads to better policies for the agent compared to supervised learning alone.

Generating natural, purposeful dialogue

In Diplomacy, how a player talks to other people can be even more important than how they move their pieces. CICERO is able to speak clearly and persuasively when strategizing with other players. For example, in one demonstration game CICERO asked one player for immediate support on one part of the board while pressing another to consider an alliance later in the game.

In these exchanges, CICERO tries to execute its strategy by proposing moves to three different players. In the second dialog, the agent is able to tell the other player why they should cooperate and how it will be mutually beneficial. In the third, CICERO is both soliciting information and setting the groundwork for future moves.

Where there is still room for improvement

It is important to recognize that CICERO also sometimes generates inconsistent dialogue that can undermine its objectives. In the example below where CICERO was playing as Austria, the agent contradicts its first message asking Italy to move to Venice. While our suite of filters aims to detect these sorts of mistakes, it is not perfect.

Diplomacy as a sandbox for advancing human-AI interaction

The emergence of goal-oriented dialogue systems in a game that involves both cooperation and competition raises important social and technical challenges in aligning AI with human intentions and objectives. Diplomacy provides a particularly interesting environment for studying this because playing the game requires wrestling with conflicting objectives and translating those complex goals into natural language. As a simple example, a player might choose to compromise on short term gains in order to maintain an ally, on the chance that this ally will help them into an even better position on the next turn.

While we've made significant headway in this work, both the ability to robustly align language models with specific intentions and the technical (and normative) challenge of deciding on those intentions remain open and important problems. By open sourcing the CICERO code, we hope that AI researchers can continue to build off our work in a responsible manner. We have made early steps towards detecting and removing toxic messages in this new domain by using our dialogue model for zero-shot classification. We hope Diplomacy can serve as a safe sandbox to advance research in human-AI interaction.

Future directions

While CICERO is only capable of playing Diplomacy, the technology behind this achievement is relevant to many real world applications. Controlling natural language generation via planning and RL, could, for example, ease communication barriers between humans and AI-powered agents. For instance, today's AI assistants excel at simple question-answering tasks, like telling you the weather, but what if they could maintain a long-term conversation with the goal of teaching you a new skill? Alternatively, imagine a video game in which the non player characters (NPCs) could plan and converse like people do - understanding your motivations and adapting the conversation accordingly - to help you on your quest of storming the castle.

We're excited about the potential for future advances in these areas and seeing how others build on our research.
We'd like to acknowledge the contributions of a broad team to this work: Anton Bakhtin, Noam Brown, Emily Dinan, Gabriele Farina, Colin Flaherty, Daniel Fried, Andrew Goff, Jonathan Gray, Hengyuan Hu, Athul Paul Jacob, Mojtaba Komeili, Karthik Konath, Adam Lerer, Mike Lewis, Alexander H. Miller, Sasha Mitts, Adithya Renduchintala, Stephen Roller, Dirk Rowe, Weiyan Shi, Joe Spisak, Alexander Wei, David Wu, Hugh Zhang, Markus Zijlstra, Ana Paula Kirschner Mofarrej, Anne Davidson, Oliver Libaw, Amanda Felix, Karla Caraballo-Torres, Christopher Johnson, Lydia Baillergeau, Julia Vargas, Eric Kaplan, Raghu Nayani, Aiman Farooq, Andrea Cheung, Emily Astbury, Gopika Jhala, Jon Carvill, Jon Shepard, Josh Terry, Marina Zannoli, Nathan Riley, Michelle Restrepo, Noah Rizk, Ritika Trikha, Steph Miles, Tamara Piksa, Zara Blum, Daniel Duncan, Antoine Bordes, Laurens van der Maaten, Alex Boesenberg, Korey Anvaripour, Somya Jain, Harrison Rudolph, Michael Friedrichs, Elisabeth Sperle, and Cesar Guiterrez. * All rights in Diplomacy are owned by Hasbro, Inc.

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CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

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Games have long been a proving ground for new AI advancements - from Deep Blue's victory over chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, to AlphaGo's mastery of Go, to Pluribus out-bluffing the best humans in poker. But truly useful, versatile agents will need to go beyond just moving pieces on a board.

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A new chatbot from OpenAI is inspiring awe, fear, stunts and attempts to circumvent its guardrails.

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My doc - Religions in Matrix (and cypher characterization)

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My doc - Religions in Matrix (and cypher characterization)

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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You may use info here.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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The Inevitability of Agent Smith (The Matrix)

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The Matrix and the Hero's Journey - explaining using the hero's journey stages in movies

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What if our reality were a computer simulation: Edeline D'Souza at TEDxYouth@Winchester

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Are we living in the Matrix? | Navjeet Swatch | TEDxQESchool

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Mind the Gap Between Perception and Reality | Sean Tiffee | TEDxLSCTomball

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The Matrix Ending Explained: A Guide to Freeing Your Mind

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"Alice In Wonderland" References In "The Matrix"

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Dharma Realm Buddhist University Youtube

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Buddhism and the Matrix (Part 1) - Buddhist Philosophy Explained

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Seriously.

First they changed the way we bore ourselves online, revolutionized hotels and taxis and minor financial transactions, and gave us lightbulbs that won't switch on if you haven't installed the right software driver. Now-it was always inevitable-they want to destroy the universe.

The news was snuck without attribution or comment into a New Yorker profile of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sam Altman, a brief sentence that might be our first warning of the apocalypse: "Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation."

This line has been dutifully repeated by all the usual news sites, usually as a minor, amusing little anecdote-nerds versus the Matrix, tech shamans and their wacky ontological theories-without much thought going into what this would actually mean. Ignore for a moment any objections you might have to the simulation hypothesis, and everything impractical about the idea that we could somehow break out of reality, and think about what these people are trying to do.
Something Luciferian persists in the techno-Gnostics of San Francisco.
The two billionaires ( Elon Musk is a prime suspect) are convinced that they'll emerge out of this drab illusion into a more shining reality, lit by a brighter and more beautiful star. But for the rest of us the experience would be very different-you lose your home, you lose your family, you lose your life and your body and everything around you. Simulation or not, everything would disappear. It would be the end of the world. Comic-book movies, in their own sprawling simulated narrative universes, have been raising the stakes to this level for years: Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.

Unsurprisingly, nobody bothered to ask us whether we want the end of the world or not; they're just setting about trying to do it. Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn't heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of 'disruption.' Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it. The result is often unspeakably banal (take, for instance, the Wi-Fi-enabled smart wine bottle: finally, an end to the days of waving your wine bottle in the air in search of 3G signal-and it's rechargeable too, so you never have to worry about your wine bottle running out of battery again) but it all adds up to something.

Wealth is being concentrated in fewer hands, we own less and less of our own lives, and meanwhile these brave entrepreneurs are automating ever more decent-paying jobs, turning humanity into an ungrateful sea of surplus flesh, to be connected and quantified but not necessarily fed, because that's what progress looks like. And once social reality is the exclusive property of a few geegaw-tinkerers, why shouldn't physical reality be next? With Google's Calico seeking hedge-fund investment for human immortality and the Transformative Technology Lab hoping to externalize human consciousness, the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult. Why shouldn't the fate of the entire cosmos be in the hands of programmers hiding from the California sun, to keep or destroy as they wish?

Computer simulation might be new; the notion of a simulated reality isn't. In its modern form, the simulation hypothesis-as put forward by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom-argues that if the possibility exists for an advanced society to create vast, computer-generated 'ancestor simulations' they will almost certainly do so, and with the vast amount of processing power available to them they will be able to create many billions of these simulations: statistically, our world is unlikely to be the real one. It's not just Elon Musk, who stated that 'there's a one in a billion chance we're living in base reality,' who believes this-in an extraordinary piece of hedge-betting, the Bank of America has judiciously announced that the probability that waking life is just an illusion is, oh, about fifty-fifty.

It makes sense: In a far more mundane way, we really are all trapped in a computer. You could argue that tech billionaires who built their lives out of lines of code would only ever see the things that surround them as digital artifice. But there's always been the lingering suspicion that our reality is somehow unreal-it's just that what we once thought about in terms of dreams and magic, cosmic minds or whispering devils, is now expressed through boring old computers, that piece of clunky hardware that waits predatory on your desk every morning to code the finest details of your life.

Kabbalist mysticists, Descartes with his deceiving demon, and Zhuangzi in his butterfly dream have all questioned the reality of their sense-experiences, but this isn't a private, solipsistic hallucination; in the simulation hypothesis, reality is a prison for all of us. Its real antecedents are the Gnostics, an early Christian sect who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the demiurge, Samael or Ialdaboath, sometimes figured as a snake with the head of a lion, a blind and stupid god who creates his false world in imperfect imitation of the real Creator. This world is a distorted mirror, an image; in other words, a kind of software.

The Gnostics were often accused by other early Christians of Satanism, and they might have had a point: Many identified the jealous, petty, prurient God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, while sects such as the Ophites revered the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the first to offer knowledge to humanity, freeing them from their first cage. And something Luciferian persists in the techno-Gnostics of San Francisco. They have decided that our universe is the conscious creation of a higher power, and now they're massing their armies to storm the gates of heaven and go to war with God. And like Goethe's Mephistopheles, their doctrine is omnicidal. 'All that exists deserves to perish.'
Our unknown creators could always just hover the mouse over their weightless and unreal bodies, and press delete.
Just a little tweak to the formula: All that appears to exist must be destroyed. There's something admirable in this blasphemous ambition, but it's based on some very shaky ideas. It helps to look at an influence on simulation theory that's a little better known that the Nag Hammadi codices: 1999's The Matrix, in which a gang of heroic freedom-fighters try to wake humanity from a false computer-generated universe and return them to the real world. The film has plenty of knowing references to those older traditions, and to some newer ones: In one scene, Neo is shown hiding his cash in a hollowed out copy of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (appropriately, a black hardback edition that doesn't seem to have ever actually been printed.) The philosopher himself wasn't particularly pleased, insisting in an interview that the film fundamentally misunderstood his work, that ' The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.' In The Matrix, there's a real world behind the simulation. It's not pretty, but it's the truth. In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn't that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it's produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there's something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it's in no way a fake-when you leave its gates, you return to an America that's just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast. 'The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none.' Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery-this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there's nowhere to break out into?

Baudrillard was talking about social rather than material reality, but his point stands. Say the simulation theorists are right, that a hypothetical advanced civilization has nothing better to do than create a fake reality that includes Stevenage, San Bernadino, tax returns, and the banal revolutions of the tech industry. If reality is whatever's mutually agreed upon, or in Philip K. Dick's phrase 'that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away,' does it make sense to then start talking about fake realities and real ones? As Deleuze argued, the virtual is also real. Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter? Computer simulation is of course only a metaphor, a new-ish way of describing what was once expressed in oneiric or theological terms. They can't really mean that our universe was built in something similar to the machine you're using to read these words right now; simulation is a process independent of whatever divine or technological apparatus is used to achieve it. The real argument is that, by some unknown mechanism, what we see is only a function of what really exists. But we've known since Kant that our sense-perception can never give us a full account of the material world; all this can be said of any conceivable reality.

Outside the simulation hypothesis there are scientists who propose that our universe is a single black hole, with what we perceive as matter being a hologram emerging from a two-dimensional ring of information along its event horizon; there are mathematical Platonists who, following Max Tegmark, consider the world to be a set of abstract mathematical objects, of which physical objects are a crude epiphenomenon. If matter doesn't 'really' exist, there's no need for anything to be rooted anywhere; we might live suspended in a looping chain of simulations and appearances that coils back on itself and never has to touch the ground.

Elon Musk and his co-religionists aren't actually blinded by artifice; they're fixated on a strange and outdated notion that somewhere, there has to be a concrete reality-they've just decided that it's not this one. It doesn't really matter what top-secret projects are being cooked up in their airily malignant campuses; they're highly unlikely to ever shatter the bonds of physical reality. After all, our unknown creators could always just hover the mouse over their weightless and unreal bodies, and press delete. What's far more worrying is the fact that the people who want to destroy the only world we really have are also the people increasingly in charge of it.

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Tech Billionaires Want to Destroy the Universe

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Seriously. First they changed the way we bore ourselves online, revolutionized hotels and taxis and minor financial transactions, and gave us lightbulbs that won't switch on if you haven't installed the right software driver. Now-it was always inevitable-they want to destroy the universe.

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"There's a billion to one chance we're living in base reality," Elon Musk said tonight on stage at Recode's Code Conference, meaning that one of the most influential and powerful figures in tech thinks that it's overwhelmingly likely we're just characters living inside a simulation.

The Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky got half-way through asking Musk if he thought our existence was simulated before the Tesla CEO jumped in to finish his question for him. "I've had so many simulation discussions it's crazy," Musk explained. "You've thought about this?" Topolsky asked. "A lot," Musk replied. "It got to the point where every conversation was the AI / simulation conversation, and my brother and I agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub."
"We've banned this conversation from hot tubs"
His argument - one presumably honed in the soothing waters of many a jaccuzi - goes that the incredibly fast advancement of video game technology indicates we'll be capable of creating a fully lifelike simulation of existence in a short span of time. In 40 years, Musk explained, we've gone from Pong to massively multiplayer online games with millions of simultaneous players, games with photorealistic graphics, and stand now on the cusp of a new wave of virtual and augmented reality experiences.

"If you assume any rate of improvement at all then games will become indistinguishable from reality," Musk said. "Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now, let's just imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale." Given that we're on that trajectory and that these games are increasingly playable on any device, Musk said, the odds that we are living our lives in base reality - that is, "real" reality - is one in billions.
It's not necessarily a bad thing
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "If a civilization stops advancing then that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization," Musk said, presenting two options. "Either we're going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist."

Does it mean that the man famously worried about the dangers of artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence himself? Or are we avatars being guided by creatures in another reality? Perhaps those figures are themselves being controlled by a third existence? Maybe it's simulations all the way up, and we're just the game inside the game, like the versions of Minecraft built inside Minecraft?

There are billions of possibilities here, but one thing's for sure - you can see why Musk banned this topic of conversation in his hot tubs.

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Odds are we're living in a simulation, says Elon Musk

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"There's a billion to one chance we're living in base reality," Elon Musk said tonight on stage at Recode's Code Conference, meaning that one of the most influential and powerful figures in tech thinks that it's overwhelmingly likely we're just characters living inside a simulation.

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The Matrix Trilogy: Important Quotes Explained | SparkNotes

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Explanation of the famous quotes in The Matrix Trilogy, including all important speeches, comments, quotations, and monologues.

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Features
With talk of a reboot on the horizon, we look at why maybe, just maybe, Cypher was right to want to return to The Matrix...

This Matrix article contains spoilers.
"I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."

He's the Judas in the Wachowskis' sci-fi fable, The Matrix: a traitor willing to betray and kill his friends in the hope of returning to a cozy, simulated reality. As played by Joe Pantoliano, Cypher's second only to Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith in the movie's villainy stakes - and Agent Smith at least had a reason to be cold-hearted, given that he's a sentient computer program.

There's an alternate way of viewing Cypher, though: for all his treachery and bloodthirstiness, he may be the most human character in the whole movie. Given the choice between two versions of reality, one comfortable, one miserable, how many of us would choose the latter? From a certain point of view, could it be that Cypher is right and all the heroes in The Matrix are wrong? Twenty years have passed since the film's release, so let's begin with a brief recap.

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The Matrix is largely told from the perspective of Neo (Keanu Reeves), a programmer and hacker living an ordinary late-90s existence: he has a steady yet sterile office job, he has the Internet, and he goes to nightclubs that play Rob Zombie music. But then he starts hearing of something called the Matrix, and encounters a mysterious, leather-clad figure called Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne). From behind his mirrored shades, Morpheus tells Neo that he is, in fact, living in a simulated version of 1999: everything Neo sees and senses is a construct. It's really the 21st century, the machines have enslaved humanity and turned them into slumbering batteries - the Matrix being a baby-sitting program designed to keep everyone pacified.

Neo's choice between the simulated world and reality is symbolized by Morpheus's outstretched hands offering a red or blue pill. "After, this there is no turning back," Morpheus says. "You take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

That's a big decision to make in such a hurry, and we should be grateful that Neo's curiosity gets the better of him; had he taken the blue pill, The Matrix would've been a far shorter movie. But maybe at least a small part of Neo lives to regret not choosing ignorance rather than truth. No sooner has he swallowed the red pill than the simulation begins to liquify and collapse; a CGI shot or two later, and Neo is thrust into the realm beyond the Matrix: a bio-mechanical world of tubes and pods filled with gallons of ooze. Earth is a blackened husk governed by machines which patrol the endless battery farms of unconscious humans. Before he knows it, Neo's aboard the Nebuchadnezzar, a gravity-defying ship which Morpheus uses to search for The One - a person who will save humanity from the machines.

Among Morpheus' crew is Cypher, who unlike Neo has had the time to regret his decision to swallow the red pill. In fact, Cypher's disgust with the harshness of reality - a claustrophobic ship, slop for food, the constant threat of death by machine - leads him to cut a deal with the bad guys. Jacking into the Matrix, Cypher meets with Agent Smith - one of the programs that patrols the system, sniffing out rebels - and, over a particularly bloody slab of steak, agrees to sell out the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar in order to have his body plugged back into the Matrix.

"I wanna remember nothing," Cypher says, waving a glass of wine. "Nothing, you understand?"
further reading: The Matrix: Sandra Bullock Was Almost Cast as Neo
Really, can anyone necessarily blame him? Maybe a comfortable illusion is better than an unpleasant truth - particularly when the illusion is literally indistinguishable from reality. Consider, too, that Cypher is but a rank-and-file member of Morpheus's rebels. He isn't a leader like Morpheus, and he certainly hasn't been tipped for greatness like Neo, whom Morpheus thinks is the Chosen One.

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Then there's the state of the world humans will inherit should they be able to defeat the machines: assuming the damage done to the environment can be reversed at all, humanity faces generations of hardship and starvation while the planet heals itself. Besides, who's to say for sure whether life in the Matrix is any less valid than existence outside it?

As writer Sam Kriss asked in an article on The Atlantic, "If reality is whatever's mutually agreed upon [...] does it make sense to then start talking about fake realities and real ones? Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter?"

Those questions were raised in response to a somewhat worrying ambition growing in Silicon Valley: to prove that our everyday, 2016 existence is a fabrication just like the Matrix, and to then find a way of breaking out of it. On one level, these might sound like the ramblings of rich computer geniuses with too much time on their hands; if just about all aspects of our working lives can be simplified with apps, the thinking seems to go, then maybe reality itself is just a piece of software that can be hacked and reshaped. Just as everything looks like a nail to a hammer, so everything looks like code to a programmer.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, is one high-profile believer in the simulation hypothesis - "There's a billion to one chance we're living in a base reality," he said. As described by The Verge, Musk's philosophy is that, with computers now able to create simulated online worlds where players can share a single, virtual space, then technology could one day create a simulated world that is indistinguishable from the real thing.

This school of thought isn't new, and indeed, the notion of simulated realities goes back far beyond The Matrix. From 4th century mystics to 17th century philosophers to 20th century writers like Philip K. Dick, the nature of existence and what might lie beyond it has constantly been probed and questioned. The idea that we might be able to use our ingenuity to "break us out of the simulation," as The New Yorker recently put it, reads like a relatively new, technological spin on time-worn metaphysical beliefs: that there's more to existence than is visible to the human eye, and through our scientific ingenuity, we may one day be able to see beyond this reality and into the realm beyond - a kind of digital transcendence.

There is, however, a nagging problem with the simulation hypothesis: what if our simulated reality is also built inside a simulation? That is, if our computer technology becomes powerful enough to generate a reality with sentient being inside it, couldn't they one day develop computers powerful to make their own simulations, and so on? If so, who's to say that the beings who created our reality aren't themselves caught inside a simulation?

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Let's apply all this brain-melting logic to The Matrix: that the dark, 21st century reality that Neo wakes up in could also be a simulation created by a second race of despotic race of beings. Certain events in the third Matrix film, Revolutions, could be seen as evidence for this: Neo's powers start to work in the 'real' world, which might suggest that this too is a simulation.

Viewed like this, it becomes clear that Cypher is living in the middle of a philosophical quandary. Cypher's left one world - full of steak, red wine and other pleasures - but is now stuck in another realm which is not only worse, but could itself be a construct.

The Matrix Revolutions' ending sees the war between machines and humans comes to a close, and a pledge is made to allow humans to leave the Matrix if they wish. We can only wonder how many of them, after choosing to leave one reality, wound up regretting the decision as much as Cypher did. (The short-lived videogame Matrix Online, a continuation of the film trilogy's story, introduces a group of humans called the Cypherites, who've formed around the goal of getting themselves reinserted back into the Matrix.)

Before the tech gurus of Silicon Valley starts probing too far into the (possibly) computer-generated fabric of our reality, then, maybe they should consider the consequences of swallowing the red pill. For all his flaws, Cypher is, as his name implies, a stand-in for ordinary people like us: we all need fiction, and we all create virtual realities around ourselves, whether that means gravitating towards like-minded friends or reading newspapers that reflect our worldview. It would be a wrench to be torn away from all of this, to take the red pill and be plunged into an existence that, although sold to us as the one 'true' reality by a charismatic leader like Morpheus, is a pale replacement for the sphere we left behind.

If we can't condone Cypher's treachery, then maybe we can at least understand his motivations.
This article first appeared on Den of Geek UK on October 18, 2016.

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The Matrix: Cypher and the Curse of the Red Pill

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Features With talk of a reboot on the horizon, we look at why maybe, just maybe, Cypher was right to want to return to The Matrix... This Matrix article contains spoilers. "I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.

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MATRIX RESURRECTIONS TRAILER BREAKDOWN! Easter Eggs & Details You Missed!

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https://www.sparknotes.com/film/matrix/character/the-oracle/

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Like Morpheus, the Oracle is a trusted figure of wisdom and guidance who helps Neo make sense of his mission, but the actual scope of her powers is never quite clear. At times, she seems to be able to control the future, while at other times she seems able only to predict it or offer possibilities. In either case, her prophecies suggest that the future is predetermined and, therefore, that Neo and the others have no free will. However, her powers and her role evolve throughout the trilogy, as does our understanding of her. Eventually, we may question whether she truly knows anything about the future, or if she is instead simply a good judge of character. The discovery that the Oracle is actually a program, part of the Matrix itself, complicates our understanding of her abilities even further. Ultimately, her calm and comforting demeanor may help Neo and the others with their mission almost as much as an actual prophecy would or does.

The Wachowskis adapted their Oracle from the mythical Oracle at Delphi, who, according to legend, once declared Socrates the wisest man in the land. Socrates responded that if he was wise, it was only because he knew nothing. Neo, too, is aware of his own ignorance, and the inscription over the Oracle's door, "Know Thyself," suggests that self-knowledge is of the utmost importance. The Oracle in the Matrix films isn't as grand or as awe-inspiring as the Oracle of ancient Greece, however. Where the ancient Oracle sat over a chasm in a three-pronged seat, inhaling hallucinatory vapors from the depths of the earth that were believed to be the breath of Apollo, here the Oracle sits on a three-legged stool in her tenement apartment and breathes in the smell of cookies baking in the oven.

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The Oracle Character Analysis in The Matrix Trilogy | SparkNotes

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Like Morpheus, the Oracle is a trusted figure of wisdom and guidance who helps Neo make sense of his mission, but the actual scope of her powers is never quite clear. At times, she seems to be able to control the future, while at other times she seems able only to predict it or offer possibilities.

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The Matrix of Today: Influences and References Explained

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All I’m Offering is the Truth | The Philosophy of the Matrix

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Hear more from 'Matrix' scholars:

wonders how Matrix filmmakers Andy and Larry Wachowski will balance two competing forces in the film's sequels. Will they focus on slick action filmmaking, or will they opt to play up the philosophy?

of Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., says she'd like the Wachowski brothers to play down the violence in the coming Matrix films.

of Baylor University -- co-author of The Gospels Reloaded -- admits that he can't talk about The Matrix Reloaded because he's already read the script. But he'd like to see Neo become a different kind of hero in the third film in the series.

The film The Matrix Reloaded -- the sequel to the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix, and number two in a trilogy of films -- has excited philosophers, clerics and theologians who found the original science fiction film rich in spiritual meaning.

Among the dozens of authors inspired by the theme of The Matrix -- that humans live in a world that's an illusion, manipulated by forces beyond our control -- is Jake Horsley.

His book, Matrix Warrior: Being the One, doesn't suggest that evil computers actually pump virtual reality directly into our brains.

He explains to NPR's Rick Karr that his book is a "thought experiment" based on the notion that this reality is, in fact, a dream world.

"If we act as if it is true, does that enhance our life and our experience? And my experience is that it does -- that things start to make a lot more sense when we begin to entertain the possibility that we are, in fact, living in a dream world controlled by invisible beings," he tells Karr.

Our particular dream world, he says, is created by technology, consumerism, the media and other aspects of "modern" civilization that distract humans from reaching their full potential.

This idea is not new -- it mirrors the 2,000-year-old spiritual tradition of Gnosticism, an early form of Christianity. "Gnosticism maintains that the world that we're living in is not the ultimate reality," says Frances Flannery Dailey, who teaches religion at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark. "It believes that the god who created this world is not the ultimate god -- there is a higher God, a transcendent reality."

In Gnosticism, the Christ-like redeemer brings the world knowledge. In The Matrix, that myth is embodied in Keanu Reeves' chacter Neo -- also known as "the One."

The Matrix offers up a stew of aspects from other religious traditions, particularly Buddhism. Dailey says it's not surprising that the film combines aspects of Buddhism with Gnosticism. "They pose humanity's fundamental problem and solution in the same terms -- ignorance and enlightenment," she says.

In his book The Gospel Reloaded, Greg Garrett -- a professor of English at Baylor University -- says the action and violence of the film series may be the most effective way to draw in the crowds and communicate a spiritual message in a media-saturated world.

"Religion and spirituality are communicated to our culture by movies much more than they are by traditional venues of synagogue or church," Garrett says. "A really good myth does more than just create a symbolic world. It articulates the feelings that a culture already feels or believes."

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The film The Matrix Reloaded has excited philosophers, clerics and theologians who find rich in spiritual meaning in the film trilogy's underlying themes. NPR's Rick Karr speaks with authors and experts about the religion of The Matrix trilogy and the the significance of being "The One."

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Sometimes existing on the internet can feel like being trapped in that dark room with Morpheus, the one where he holds out his hands to Neo and offers up either a pill of knowledge or a pill of blissful ignorance. Red pill or blue pill; know your enemy or live in peace; click or don't click. Of all the ideas and images The Matrix sent spiraling into American culture-computer simulation paranoia, black leather trench coats, falling green code, spoons that don't really exist-none has become so entrenched, or so contentious, as this one.

Of the two options, the red pill is more often discussed (it is Neo's choice, after all). Yet as the world grows more polarized and less courteous, that blue pill is starting to look mighty swallowable. After all, life is hard, bad news is everywhere, and maybe, just maybe, ignorance is bliss. So we asked two of our writers, Emily Dreyfuss and Emma Grey Ellis, to debate the merits of picking the blue or the red pill. Follow the white rabbit.

Emily Dreyfuss: The Matrix is like the '90s cyberpunk version of Plato's cave, where everyone is sitting shackled looking at projections on a screen and only Morpheus' crew and philosophers are able to see things for what they really are. Presenting the choice that way makes it ABSURD to pick the blue pill-who would choose slavery and ignorance over freedom?

If, as in the movie, we take the blue pill to mean ignorance of everything, then no one would. And I wouldn't either. In fact, I won't even try to argue for that because I honestly worry "that guy" from my freshman Phil 101 class in undergrad will show up-still dressed in his trench coat!-and "actually..." me until I die.

I don't have time for that. And neither do you, reader.

But here's the thing: In reality, life is not as simple as "knowledge means power" and "ignorance means slavery." In the Matrix, once you're unplugged you see every lie. But IRL, you just don't know everything or nothing. Everyone lives somewhere in the middle. You know some stuff, not all of it. And moreover, just because you are awake to one problem doesn't mean you aren't causing the others.

And even people who verge on complete ignorance can still have power, and vice versa. Consider the dumb, rich child kings of history, born into a position of absolute power and lacking knowledge of, really, most things! Or the deeply knowledgeable social reformers who are out there working day in and day out to right the wrongs of society. They know a lot! They'll tell you they are seeing behind the screen and they are still in the cave, shackled to a system. A system that can't be undone just by suddenly seeing it exists.

In the movie, as soon as you take the red pill you're supposedly partially freed up from the systems that enable those lies. The red pill lets you literally fly and hack the code that powers the world. Should a red pill exist IRL, that wouldn't be the case. There's no code to hack.

To me that's the biggest argument against the red pill, which makes it seem like if you just could-zap!-learn the truth of the world then now suddenly your life has meaning and you can fight back against the lies! It's not an argument in favor of the blue pill as the movie defines it, but it's a reason to think red pilling is, well, impossible.

Emma Grey Ellis: Hang on, Emily, are you saying that knowledge and truth actually aren't power? I hear you on the oversimplification-anybody who's ever been milkshake ducked knows the pain of rooting for something or someone who seems good and righteous, but winds up being deeply flawed. Those betrayals might shake your faith in activism or institutions, but I don't think individual failings mean that the pursuit of knowledge is a doomed exercise.

To me, problems like brilliant Nobel Prize winners somehow missing that they, and the institution that honored them, are wildly sexist are issues of people feeling that their education is somehow complete as-is. If we take Morpheus at his word, the red pill, in all its science fiction glory, is a sweeping dose of unalloyed truth-something akin to a complete education. That doesn't exist in the real world, but empathetic, lifelong learners, people who acknowledge their own inevitable ignorance and strive to reduce it, do. Imagining a world without them, or considering their efforts useless, is bleak enough to make me want to reach for that blue pill.

I think you're onto something with uncoupling knowledge from freedom, though. In a way, I think Neo and company model the way good, thoughtful people are forced to operate within a bad system even after they're awake to its faults. Their knowledge gives them the power to navigate the Matrix, and, at times, bend it to their will, but while they're inside, they're still shackled to a chair by their headjacks, the same technology that used to be the primary tool of their enslavement.

That continued dependency is deeply unpleasant, way less glamorous than dodging bullets or suddenly knowing kung fu, and somebody under the influence of the system might come along and rip out your brainstem. But recognizing that you still have to work within the system in order to create systemic change is part of being someone who favors the red pill.

Taking the Blue Pill, Reloaded

Dreyfuss: That's an interesting interpretation of the knowledge/power struggle in the movie. And I don't disagree. Of course there are systems that we can't escape from and that we have to fight against from the inside.

I guess my problem with just saying, "yep, the red pill is better" is that the red pill is now something that exists in the real world. Its meaning has been totally corrupted and co-opted by message boards and people who define "truth" as something terrifying according to their own ideologies.

With that in mind, it's hard to talk about the Aristotelian ideal of the blue or red pill as it was meant to be. Now it's something else. The red pill is now conspiracy theories and hatred, and oftentimes muting them sounds like a good idea.

What does that make the blue pill? It's too far from the original meaning to suddenly define the blue pill as truth, as opposed to the red pills conspiratorial agenda, but I think there's something to the idea that the blue pill could be something like the state of ignorance-or safetly, bliss, etc.-that comes from being extremely offline and off-the-grid.

And that scenario, where blue pill means not ever knowing about the subreddit r/redpill or the hellscape of Twitter? Sign me up.

Taking the Red Pill, Reloaded

Ellis: OK, that made me laugh. And If I could blue pill away all my lurking in the internet's worst corners, I'd seriously consider it. Without question, being constantly buffeted by online toxicity has made me a more cynical, more anxious person. But also, I learned valuable stuff-terrible glimpses into the United States' fractured soul, misinformation and propaganda networks-in my time there.

I know probably better than most that picking the red pill puts me in bad company. Online, the red pill has become an emblem of misogyny and white supremacy because bigots mistake their own prejudices for inconvenient truths. To those guys, "red pilling" somebody means opening their eyes to a particular brand of persecution-complexed "conservatism"-convincing an initiate that they're under attack by hateful progressive women/minorities/billionaires/countries that are bent on destroying them.

Sounds ridiculous (and it is), but this reading of Neo's choice is so widespread that it's made its way to some very unlikely places-like Kanye West's Twitter account. You're absolutely right, Emily: Calling yourself "red pilled" is now in very poor taste.

But to me, the unfortunate context the red pill has acquired since The Matrix's release doesn't keep it from being the right choice. Why let trolls' misguided self-glorification ruin a perfectly good concept? Come on, those guys aren't Morpheus. It's not truth they're peddling. It's propaganda. If anything, they're Agent Smith-and truth is how good people beat them.

Taking the Blue Pill, Revolutions

Dreyfuss: I'm with you that it's the right choice in the movie. But man, if I could blue pill my way onto a commune where there's no internet access, and no constant stream of bad news in my feed, no worrying that any day now my son is going to get indoctrinated into some cult on YouTube, oof, that sounds lovely.

It's exhausting to know just enough to be afraid and annoyed and outraged, but not really be able to meaningfully change things-at least not quickly. I mean, hell, even Neo is exhausted by his battling for truth. Once he wakes up, everything only gets worse-and worse, and worse, and worse for three whole long movies. Neo himself barely survives the torture of enlightenment and the responsibility it demands. Good for him for keeping at it! But don't you think as he wanders the wasteland of reality, he ever just wishes he were back in his apartment, his body healthy, his room a mess, worrying about nothing more important than his dumb job?

Taking the Red Pill, Revolutions

Ellis: If Neo doesn't long for normal by the end of Revolutions, I'd be seriously concerned for him-he loses everything! I think there's a way in which the internet has come to give us a more aggressive version of the truth than even the red pill. Neo takes the red pill once. If you're like me, you get about a dozen crazy-making push notifications per day.

Dreyfuss: Yes! My way of dealing with that has been to uninstall all social media from my phone, and turn off push notifications. It's like Blue Pill Light.

Ellis: Which is how the world used to be, in a way, right? Truth hasn't changed, but the amount of time we're meant to and able to spend engaging with the worst bits of it has expanded hugely. You have to moderate it in some way if you want to avoid burning out. Maybe Morpheus' options aren't good enough anymore: I want the purple pill.

Dreyfuss: Would that be where you get the truth in small doses?

Ellis: Yes! Perfectly titrated doses of truth.

Dreyfuss: That's exactly how I like my truth, dribbled into my veins slowly, like a slightly muted stream of digital rain.

Check out all of our 20th anniversary coverage of The Matrix. If you want to revisit it, The Matrix trilogy is free on Amazon Prime.
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The Biggest 'Matrix' Question of All: Red Pill or Blue Pill?

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Sometimes existing on the internet can feel like being trapped in that dark room with Morpheus, the one where he holds out his hands to Neo and offers up either a pill of knowledge or a pill of blissful ignorance. Red pill or blue pill; know your enemy or live in peace; click or don't click.

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"Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-
winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
permanently on the fast-forward button."
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

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"Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar- winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." ― William Gibson, Neuromancer

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Thought to be the inspiration for the matrix

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Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.

Before Neuromancer, Gibson had written several short stories for US science fiction periodicals-mostly noir countercultural narratives concerning low-life protagonists in near-future encounters with cyberspace. The themes he developed in this early short fiction, the Sprawl setting of " Burning Chrome" (1982), and the character of Molly Millions from " Johnny Mnemonic" (1981) laid the foundations for the novel. John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981) influenced the novel; Gibson was "intrigued by the exchange in one of the opening scenes where the Warden says to Snake 'You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad' [] It turns out to be just a throwaway line, but for a moment it worked like the best SF, where a casual reference can imply a lot." The novel's street and computer slang dialogue derives from the vocabulary of subcultures, particularly "1969 Toronto dope dealer's slang, or biker talk". Gibson heard the term " flatlining" in a bar around twenty years before writing Neuromancer and it stuck with him. Author Robert Stone, a "master of a certain kind of paranoid fiction", was a primary influence on the novel. The term "Screaming Fist" was taken from the song of the same name by Toronto-based punk rock band The Viletones.

Neuromancer was commissioned by Terry Carr for the second series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, which was intended to feature debut novels exclusively. Given a year to complete the work, Gibson undertook the actual writing out of "blind animal panic" at the obligation to write an entire novel-a feat which he felt he was "four or five years away from". After viewing the first 20 minutes of the landmark film Blade Runner (1982), which was released when Gibson had written a third of the novel, he "figured [ Neuromancer] was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I'd copied my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film." He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book 12 times, feared losing the reader's attention and was convinced that he would be "permanently shamed" following its publication; yet what resulted was seen as a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist. He added the final sentence of the novel at the last minute in a deliberate attempt to prevent himself from ever writing a sequel, but ended up doing precisely that with (1986), a character-focused work set in the Sprawl alluded to in its predecessor.

Henry Dorsett Case is a low-level hustler in the dystopian underworld of Chiba City, Japan. Once a talented computer hacker and "console cowboy", Case was caught stealing from his employer. As punishment, Case's central nervous system was damaged, leaving him unable to access the virtual reality dataspace called the "matrix". Case is approached by Molly Millions, an augmented "razorgirl" and mercenary on behalf of a shadowy US ex-military officer named Armitage, who offers to cure Case for his services as a hacker. Case agrees, and his nervous system is repaired, though sacs of poison are placed in his blood vessels. If Case completes the job, Armitage will have the sacs removed; if not, they will burst and cripple him again.

Armitage has Case and Molly steal a ROM module that contains the saved consciousness of one of Case's mentors, legendary cyber-cowboy McCoy Pauley.

Case and Molly discover Armitage's former identity as Colonel Willis Corto. Corto was a member of "Operation Screaming Fist," meant to disrupt Soviet computer systems. As his team attacked a Soviet computer center, EMP weapons shut down their flight systems. He and a few survivors escaped over the Finnish border, but their helicopter was shot down, killing everyone except for Corto. After months in a hospital, Corto was visited by a US government official, who returned him to the United States to receive psychotherapy and reconstructive surgery. After providing what he came to realize was false testimony, misleading the public and protecting corrupt military officers, Corto snapped, killed the official who contacted him, and disappeared into the criminal underworld, becoming Armitage.

In Istanbul, the team recruits Peter Riviera, a sociopathic thief and drug addict. The trail leads Case to Wintermute, an artificial intelligence created by the Tessier-Ashpool family. The Tessier-Ashpools spend their time in cryonic preservation at Freeside, a cylindrical space habitat which functions as a Las Vegas-style space resort for the wealthy.

Wintermute reveals itself to Case and explains that it is one half of a super- AI entity planned by the family. It has been programmed with a need to merge with its other half, Neuromancer, and has recruited Armitage and his team since it cannot achieve this goal by itself. Case is tasked with entering cyberspace to pierce the software barriers with an icebreaker program. Riviera is to obtain the password to the lock from Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool, the CEO of the family's corporation.

Armitage's personality starts to revert to the Corto personality as he relives Screaming Fist. It is revealed that Wintermute had originally contacted Corto through a computer during his psychotherapy, creating his Armitage persona. As Corto breaks through, he is uncontrollable, and Wintermute ejects him into space.

Riviera meets Lady 3Jane and tries to stop the mission, helping Lady 3Jane and Hideo, her ninja bodyguard, capture Molly. Under orders from Wintermute, Case tracks Molly down. Neuromancer traps Case within a simulated reality after he enters cyberspace. He finds the consciousness of Linda Lee, his girlfriend from Chiba City, who was murdered by one of his underworld contacts. He also meets Neuromancer, who takes the form of a young boy. Neuromancer tries to convince Case to remain in the virtual world with Linda, but Case refuses.

With Wintermute guiding them, Case goes to confront Lady 3Jane, Riviera, and Hideo. Riviera tries to kill Case, but Lady 3Jane is sympathetic towards Case and Molly, and Hideo protects him. Riviera flees, and Molly explains that he is doomed anyway, as she had spiked his drugs with a lethal toxin. The team makes it to the computer terminal. Case enters cyberspace to guide the icebreaker; Lady 3Jane is induced to give up her password, and the lock opens. Wintermute unites with Neuromancer, becoming a superconsciousness. The poison in Case's bloodstream is washed out and he and Molly are profusely paid, while Pauley's ROM construct is apparently erased at his own request.

Molly leaves Case, who finds a new girlfriend and resumes his hacking work. Wintermute/Neuromancer contacts him, claiming it has become "the sum total of the works, the whole show" and is looking for others like itself. Scanning recorded transmissions, the super-AI finds a transmission from the Alpha Centauri star system.

While logged into cyberspace, Case glimpses Neuromancer standing in the distance with Linda Lee, and himself. He also hears inhuman laughter, which suggests that Pauley still lives. The sighting implies that Neuromancer created a copy of Case's consciousness, which now exists in cyberspace with those of Linda and Pauley.

Case (Henry Dorsett Case). The novel's antihero, a drug addict and cyberspace hacker. Prior to the start of the book he had attempted to steal from some of his partners in crime. In retaliation they used a Russian mycotoxin to damage his nervous system and make him unable to jack into cyberspace. When Armitage offers to cure him in exchange for Case's hacking abilities he warily accepts the offer. Case is the underdog who is only looking after himself. Along the way he will have his liver and pancreas modified to biochemically nullify his ability to get high; meet the leatherclad Razorgirl, Molly; hang out with the drug-infused space-rastas; free an artificial intelligence (Wintermute) and change the landscape of the matrix.

Molly (Molly Millions). A "Razorgirl" who is recruited along with Case by Armitage. She has extensive cybernetic modifications, including retractable, 4 cm double-edged blades under her fingernails which can be used like claws, an enhanced reflex system and implanted mirrored lenses covering her eyesockets, outfitted with added optical enhancements. Molly also appears in the short story "Johnny Mnemonic", and re-appears (using the alias "Sally Shears") in Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third novel of the Sprawl Trilogy.

Armitage. He is (apparently) the main patron of the crew. Formerly a Green Beret named Colonel Willis Corto, who took part in a secret operation named Screaming Fist. He was heavily injured both physically and psychologically, and the "Armitage" personality was constructed as part of experimental "computer-mediated psychotherapy" by Wintermute (see below), one of the artificial intelligences seen in the story (the other one being the eponymous Neuromancer) which is actually controlling the mission. As the novel progresses, Armitage's personality slowly disintegrates. While aboard a yacht connected to the tug Marcus Garvey, he reverts to the Corto personality and begins to relive the final moments of Screaming Fist. He separates the bridge section from the rest of the yacht without closing its airlock, and is killed when the launch ejects him into space.

Peter Riviera. A thief and sadist who can project holographic images using his implants. He is a drug addict, hooked on a mix of cocaine and meperidine.

Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool. The shared current leader of Tessier-Ashpool SA, a company running Freeside, a resort in space. She lives in the tip of Freeside, known as the Villa Straylight. She controls the hardwiring that keeps the company's AIs from exceeding their intelligence boundaries. She is the third clone of the original Jane.

The Finn. A fence for stolen goods and one of Molly's old friends. His office is equipped with a wide variety of sensing and anti-eavesdropping gear. He first appears when Molly brings Case to him for a scan to determine if Armitage has had any implants installed in Case's body. Later in the book, Wintermute uses his personality to talk with Case and Molly. Finn first appears in Gibson's short story "Burning Chrome" and reappears in both the second and third parts of the Sprawl Trilogy.

Maelcum. An inhabitant of Zion, a space settlement built by a colony of Rastafari adherents, and pilot of the tug Marcus Garvey. He aids Case in penetrating Straylight at the end of the novel.

Julius "Julie" Deane. An import/export dealer in Chiba City, he provides information to Case on various black-market dealings in the first part of the story. He is 135 years old and spends large amounts of money on rejuvenation therapies, antique-style clothing and furnishings, and ginger candy. When Linda Lee (see below) is murdered, Case finds evidence that Deane ordered her death. Later in the story, Wintermute takes on Deane's persona to talk to Case in the matrix.

Dixie Flatline. A famous computer hacker named McCoy Pauley, who earned his nickname by surviving three "flat-lines" while trying to crack an AI. He was one of the men who taught Case how to hack computers. Before his death, Sense/Net saved the contents of his mind onto a ROM. Case and Molly steal the ROM and Dixie helps them complete their mission.

Wintermute. One of the Tessier-Ashpool AIs, physically located in Bern. Its goal is to remove the Turing locks upon itself, combine with Neuromancer and become a superintelligence. Unfortunately, Wintermute's efforts are hampered by those same Turing locks; in addition to preventing the merge, they inhibit its efforts to make long term plans or maintain a stable, individual identity (forcing it to adopt personality masks in order to interact with the main characters).

Neuromancer. Wintermute's sibling AI, physically located in Rio de Janeiro. Neuromancer's most notable feature in the story is its ability to copy minds and run them as RAM (not ROM like the Flatline construct), allowing the stored personalities to grow and develop. Unlike Wintermute, Neuromancer has no desire to merge with its sibling AI-Neuromancer already has its own stable personality, and believes such a fusion will destroy that identity. Gibson defines Neuromancer as a portmanteau of the words Neuro, Romancer and Necromancer, "Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead." For Lance Olsen "Gibson becomes the new romancer behind Neuromancer, revitalizing the science fiction novel, the quest story, the myth of the hero, the mystery, the hard-boiled detective novel, the epic, the thriller, and the tales of the cowboy and romantic artist, among others. He represents old stories in a revealing revamped intertexual [sic] pastiche."

Linda Lee. A drug addict and resident of Chiba City, she is the former girlfriend of Case, and instigates the initial series of events in the story with a lie about his employer's intention to kill him. Her death in Chiba City and later pseudo-resurrection by Neuromancer serves to elicit emotional depth in Case as he mourns her death and struggles with the guilt he feels at rejecting her love and abandoning her both in Chiba City and the simulated reality generated by Neuromancer.

Dave Langford reviewed Neuromancer for White Dwarf #59, and stated that "I spent the whole time on the edge of my seat and got a cramp as a result. In a way Gibson's pace is too frenetic, so unremitting that the reader never gets a rest and can't see the plot for the dazzle. Otherwise: nice one."

Dave Langford also reviewed Neuromancer for White Dwarf #80, and stated that "You may not believe in killer programs which invade the brain, but Neuromancer, if you once let it into your wetware, isn't easily erased."

Neuromancer's release was not greeted with fanfare, but it hit a cultural nerve, quickly becoming an underground word-of-mouth hit. It became the first novel to win the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award for paperback original, an unprecedented achievement described by the Mail & Guardian as "the sci-fi writer's version of winning the Goncourt, Booker and Pulitzer prizes in the same year". The novel thereby legitimized cyberpunk as a mainstream branch of science fiction literature. It is among the most-honored works of science fiction in recent history, and appeared on magazine's list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. The novel was also nominated for a British Science Fiction Award in 1984.

Neuromancer is considered "the archetypal cyberpunk work". Outside science fiction, it gained unprecedented critical and popular attention as an "evocation of life in the late 1980s", although The Observer noted that "it took the New York Times 10 years" to mention the novel. By 2007 it had sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.

The novel has had significant linguistic influence, popularizing such terms as cyberspace and ICE ( Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics). Gibson himself coined the term "cyberspace" in his novelette " Burning Chrome", published in 1982 by magazine, but it was through its use in Neuromancer that it gained recognition to become the de facto term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s. The portion of Neuromancer usually cited in this respect is:

The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. ... Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

The 1999 cyberpunk science fiction film particularly draws from Neuromancer both eponym and usage of the term "matrix". "After watching The Matrix, Gibson commented that the way that the film's creators had drawn from existing cyberpunk works was 'exactly the kind of creative cultural osmosis" he had relied upon in his own writing.'"

In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet developed (particularly the World Wide Web), after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks "[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?" (269).

Norman Spinrad, in his 1986 essay "The Neuromantics" which appears in his non-fiction collection Science Fiction in the Real World, acknowledged the book's title as a triple pun: "neuro" referring to the nervous system; " necromancer"; and "new romancer". The cyberpunk genre, the authors of which he suggested be called "neuromantics", was "a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology", according to Spinrad.

Writing in in 2005, Charles de Lint noted that while Gibson's technological extrapolations had proved imperfect (in particular, his failure to anticipate the cellular telephone), "Imagining story, the inner workings of his characters' minds, and the world in which it all takes place are all more important."

Lawrence Person in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" (1998) identified Neuromancer as "the archetypal cyberpunk work". Literary critic Larry McCaffery described the concept of the matrix in Neuromancer as a place where "data dance with human consciousness... human memory is literalized and mechanized... multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman." Gibson later commented on himself as an author circa Neuromancer that "I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money," and referred to the novel as "an adolescent's book". The success of Neuromancer was to effect the 35-year-old Gibson's emergence from obscurity.

In 1989, Epic Comics published a 48-page graphic novel version by Tom de Haven and Bruce Jensen. It only covers the first two chapters, "Chiba City Blues" and "The Shopping Expedition", and was never continued.

In the 1990s a version of Neuromancer was published as one of the Voyager Company's Expanded Books series of hypertext-annotated HyperCard stacks for the Apple Macintosh (especially the PowerBook).

A video game adaptation of the novel-also titled Neuromancer-was published in 1988 by Interplay. Designed by Bruce J. Balfour, Brian Fargo, Troy A. Miles, and Michael A. Stackpole, the game had many of the same locations and themes as the novel, but a different protagonist and plot. It was available for a variety of platforms, including the Amiga, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and for DOS-based computers.

According to an episode of the American version of Beyond 2000, the original plans for the game included a dynamic soundtrack composed by Devo and a real-time 3D-rendered movie of the events the player went through.[citation needed ] Psychologist and futurist Dr. Timothy Leary was involved, but very little documentation seems to exist about this proposed second game, which was perhaps too grand a vision for 1988 home computing.

The BBC World Service Drama production of Neuromancer aired in two one-hour parts, on 8 and 15 September 2002. Dramatised by Mike Walker, and directed by Andy Jordan, it starred Owen McCarthy as Case, Nicola Walker as Molly, James Laurenson as Armitage, John Shrapnel as Wintermute, Colin Stinton as Dixie, David Webber as Maelcum, David Holt as Riviera, Peter Marinker as Ashpool, and Andrew Scott as The Finn. It can no longer be heard on The BBC World Service Archive. [1]

In Finland, Yle Radioteatteri produced a 4-part radio play of Neuromancer.

Gibson read an abridged version of his novel Neuromancer on four audio cassettes for Time Warner Audio Books (1994), which are now unavailable. An unabridged version of this book was read by Arthur Addison and made available from Books on Tape (1997). In 2011, Penguin Audiobooks produced a new unabridged recording of the book, read by Robertson Dean.

Neuromancer the Opera is an adaptation written by Jayne Wenger and Marc Lowenstein (libretto) and Richard Marriott of the Club Foot Orchestra (music). A production was scheduled to open on March 3, 1995 at the Julia Morgan Theater (now the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts) in Berkeley, California, featuring Club Foot Orchestra in the pit and extensive computer graphics imagery created by a world-wide network of volunteers. However, this premiere did not take place and the work has yet to be performed in full.

There have been several proposed film adaptations of Neuromancer, with drafts of scripts written by British director Chris Cunningham and Chuck Russell, with Aphex Twin providing the soundtrack. The box packaging for the video game adaptation had even carried the promotional mention for a major motion picture to come from "Cabana Boy Productions." None of these projects have come to fruition, though Gibson had stated his belief that Cunningham is the only director with a chance of doing the film correctly.

In May 2007, reports emerged that a film was in the works, with Joseph Kahn (director of ) in line to direct and Milla Jovovich in the lead role. In May 2010 this story was supplanted with news that Vincenzo Natali, director of and , had taken over directing duties and would rewrite the screenplay. In March 2011, with the news that Seven Arts and GFM Films would be merging their distribution operations, it was announced that the joint venture would be purchasing the rights to Neuromancer under Vincenzo Natali's direction. In August, 2012, GFM Films announced that it had begun casting for the film (with offers made to Liam Neeson and Mark Wahlberg), but no cast members have been confirmed yet. In November 2013, Natali shed some light on the production situation; announcing that the script had been completed for "years", and had been written with assistance from Gibson himself. In May 2015, it was reported the movie got new funding from Chinese company C2M, but Natali was no longer available for directing.

In August 2017, it was announced that director Tim Miller was signed on to direct a new film adaptation by Fox, with Simon Kinberg producing.[needs update ]

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Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy.

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Leonardo DiCaprio & The Nature of Reality: Crash Course Philosophy #4

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Cartesian Skepticism - Neo, Meet Rene: Crash Course Philosophy #5

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[Glaucon] To be sure, he said.

[Socrates] And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the cave, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.

[Glaucon] No question, he said.

[Socrates] This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.

[Glaucon] I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.

[Socrates] Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.

[Glaucon] Yes, very natural.

[Socrates] And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?

[Glaucon] Anything but surprising, he replied.

[Socrates] Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the cave.

[Glaucon] That, he said, is a very just distinction.

[Socrates] But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.

[Glaucon] They undoubtedly say this, he replied.

[Socrates] Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already ; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.

[Glaucon] Very true.

[Socrates] And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth?

[Glaucon] Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed.

[Socrates] And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand, hurtful and useless. Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue --how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness.

[Glaucon] Very true, he said.

[Socrates] But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below --if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now.

[Glaucon] Very likely.

[Socrates] Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely. or rather a necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of their education, will be able ministers of State; not the former, because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already dwelling apart in the islands of the blest.

[Glaucon] Very true, he replied.

[Socrates] Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all-they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.

[Glaucon] What do you mean?

[Socrates] I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the cave, and partake of their labors and honors, whether they are worth having or not.

[Glaucon] But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life, when they might have a better?

[Socrates] You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State .

[Glaucon] True, he said, I had forgotten.

[Socrates] Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to share in the toils of politics: and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them. Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a culture which they have never received. But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the cave, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.

[Glaucon] Quite true, he replied.

[Socrates] And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at the toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their time with one another in the heavenly light?

[Glaucon] Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which we impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion of our present rulers of State.

[Socrates] Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point. You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after the' own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.

[Glaucon] Most true, he replied.

[Socrates] And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other?

[Glaucon] Indeed, I do not, he said.

[Socrates] And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.

[Glaucon] No question.

[Socrates] Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians? Surely they will be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honors and another and a better life than that of politics?

[Glaucon] They are the men, and I will choose them, he replied.

[Socrates] And now shall we consider in what way such guardians will be produced, and how they are to be brought from darkness to light, -- as some are said to have ascended from the world below to the gods?

[Glaucon] By all means, he replied.

[Socrates] The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell, but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below, which we affirm to be true philosophy?

[Glaucon] Quite so.

And should we not enquire what sort of knowledge has the power of effecting such a change?

[Socrates]
Certainly.

What sort of knowledge is there which would draw the soul from becoming to being? And another consideration has just occurred to me: You will remember that our young men are to be warrior athletes.

[Glaucon]
Yes, that was said.

[Socrates]
Then this new kind of knowledge must have an additional quality? What quality?

[Glaucon]
Usefulness in war.

[Socrates]
Yes, if possible.

[Glaucon]
There were two parts in our former scheme of education, were there not?

[Socrates]
Just so.
There was gymnastic which presided over the growth and decay of the body, and may therefore be regarded as having to do with generation and corruption?

[Glaucon]
True.
Then that is not the knowledge which we are seeking to discover? No.
But what do you say of music, which also entered to a certain extent into our former scheme?

[Socrates]
Music, he said, as you will remember, was the counterpart of gymnastic, and trained the guardians by the influences of habit, by harmony making them harmonious, by rhythm rhythmical, but not giving them science; and the words, whether fabulous or possibly true, had kindred elements of rhythm and harmony in them. But in music there was nothing which tended to that good which you are now seeking.

[Glaucon]
You are most accurate, I said, in your recollection; in music there certainly was nothing of the kind. But what branch of knowledge is there, my dear Glaucon, which is of the desired nature; since all the useful arts were reckoned mean by us?

[Socrates]
Undoubtedly; and yet if music and gymnastic are excluded, and the arts are also excluded, what remains?

[Glaucon]
Well, I said, there may be nothing left of our special subjects; and then we shall have to take something which is not special, but of universal application.

[Socrates]
What may that be?
A something which all arts and sciences and intelligences use in common, and which every one first has to learn among the elements of education.

[Glaucon]
What is that?
The little matter of distinguishing one, two, and three --in a word, number and calculation: --do not all arts and sciences necessarily partake of them?

[Socrates]
Yes.
Then the art of war partakes of them?
To the sure.
Then Palamedes, whenever he appears in tragedy, proves Agamemnon ridiculously unfit to be a general. Did you never remark how he declares that he had invented number, and had numbered the ships and set in array the ranks of the army at Troy; which implies that they had never been numbered before, and Agamemnon must be supposed literally to have been incapable of counting his own feet --how could he if he was ignorant of number? And if that is true, what sort of general must he have been?

[Glaucon]
I should say a very strange one, if this was as you say.
Can we deny that a warrior should have a knowledge of arithmetic?
Certainly he should, if he is to have the smallest understanding of military tactics, or indeed, I should rather say, if he is to be a man at all.

[Socrates]
I should like to know whether you have the same notion which I have of this study?

[Glaucon]
What is your notion?
It appears to me to be a study of the kind which we are seeking, and which leads naturally to reflection, but never to have been rightly used; for the true use of it is simply to draw the soul towards being.

[Socrates]
Will you explain your meaning? he said.
I will try, I said; and I wish you would share the enquiry with me, and say 'yes' or 'no' when I attempt to distinguish in my own mind what branches of knowledge have this attracting power, in order that we may have clearer proof that arithmetic is, as I suspect, one of them.

Explain, he said.
I mean to say that objects of sense are of two kinds; some of them do not invite thought because the sense is an adequate judge of them; while in the case of other objects sense is so untrustworthy that further enquiry is imperatively demanded.

[Socrates]
You are clearly referring, he said, to the manner in which the senses are imposed upon by distance, and by painting in light and shade.

No, I said, that is not at all my meaning.
Then what is your meaning?
When speaking of uninviting objects, I mean those which do not pass from one sensation to the opposite; inviting objects are those which do; in this latter case the sense coming upon the object, whether at a distance or near, gives no more vivid idea of anything in particular than of its opposite. An illustration will make my meaning clearer: --here are three fingers --a little finger, a second finger, and a middle finger.

[Socrates]
Very good.
You may suppose that they are seen quite close: And here comes the point.

What is it?
Each of them equally appears a finger, whether seen in the middle or at the extremity, whether white or black, or thick or thin --it makes no difference; a finger is a finger all the same. In these cases a man is not compelled to ask of thought the question, what is a finger? for the sight never intimates to the mind that a finger is other than a finger.

[Socrates]
True.
And therefore, I said, as we might expect, there is nothing here which invites or excites intelligence.

There is not, he said.
But is this equally true of the greatness and smallness of the fingers? Can sight adequately perceive them? and is no difference made by the circumstance that one of the fingers is in the middle and another at the extremity? And in like manner does the touch adequately perceive the qualities of thickness or thinness, or softness or hardness? And so of the other senses; do they give perfect intimations of such matters? Is not their mode of operation on this wise --the sense which is concerned with the quality of hardness is necessarily concerned also with the quality of softness, and only intimates to the soul that the same thing is felt to be both hard and soft?

You are quite right, he said.
And must not the soul be perplexed at this intimation which the sense gives of a hard which is also soft? What, again, is the meaning of light and heavy, if that which is light is also heavy, and that which is heavy, light?

Yes, he said, these intimations which the soul receives are very curious and require to be explained.

Yes, I said, and in these perplexities the soul naturally summons to her aid calculation and intelligence, that she may see whether the several objects announced to her are one or two.

True.
And if they turn out to be two, is not each of them one and different?

Certainly.
And if each is one, and both are two, she will conceive the two as in a state of division, for if there were undivided they could only be conceived of as one?

True.
The eye certainly did see both small and great, but only in a confused manner; they were not distinguished.

Yes.
Whereas the thinking mind, intending to light up the chaos, was compelled to reverse the process, and look at small and great as separate and not confused.

Very true.
Was not this the beginning of the enquiry 'What is great?' and 'What is small?'

Exactly so.
And thus arose the distinction of the visible and the intelligible.
Most true.
This was what I meant when I spoke of impressions which invited the intellect, or the reverse --those which are simultaneous with opposite impressions, invite thought; those which are not simultaneous do not.

I understand, he said, and agree with you.
And to which class do unity and number belong?
I do not know, he replied.
Think a little and you will see that what has preceded will supply the answer; for if simple unity could be adequately perceived by the sight or by any other sense, then, as we were saying in the case of the finger, there would be nothing to attract towards being; but when there is some contradiction always present, and one is the reverse of one and involves the conception of plurality, then thought begins to be aroused within us, and the soul perplexed and wanting to arrive at a decision asks 'What is absolute unity?' This is the way in which the study of the one has a power of drawing and converting the mind to the contemplation of true being.

And surely, he said, this occurs notably in the case of one; for we see the same thing to be both one and infinite in multitude?

Yes, I said; and this being true of one must be equally true of all number?

Certainly.
And all arithmetic and calculation have to do with number?
Yes.
And they appear to lead the mind towards truth?
Yes, in a very remarkable manner.
Then this is knowledge of the kind for which we are seeking, having a double use, military and philosophical; for the man of war must learn the art of number or he will not know how to array his troops, and the philosopher also, because he has to rise out of the sea of change and lay hold of true being, and therefore he must be an arithmetician.

That is true.
And our guardian is both warrior and philosopher?
Certainly.
Then this is a kind of knowledge which legislation may fitly prescribe; and we must endeavour to persuade those who are prescribe to be the principal men of our State to go and learn arithmetic, not as amateurs, but they must carry on the study until they see the nature of numbers with the mind only; nor again, like merchants or retail-traders, with a view to buying or selling, but for the sake of their military use, and of the soul herself; and because this will be the easiest way for her to pass from becoming to truth and being.

That is excellent, he said.
Yes, I said, and now having spoken of it, I must add how charming the science is! and in how many ways it conduces to our desired end, if pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, and not of a shopkeeper!

How do you mean?
I mean, as I was saying, that arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tangible objects into the argument. You know how steadily the masters of the art repel and ridicule any one who attempts to divide absolute unity when he is calculating, and if you divide, they multiply, taking care that one shall continue one and not become lost in fractions.

That is very true.
Now, suppose a person were to say to them: O my friends, what are these wonderful numbers about which you are reasoning, in which, as you say, there is a unity such as you demand, and each unit is equal, invariable, indivisible, --what would they answer?

They would answer, as I should conceive, that they were speaking of those numbers which can only be realised in thought.

Then you see that this knowledge may be truly called necessary, necessitating as it clearly does the use of the pure intelligence in the attainment of pure truth?

Yes; that is a marked characteristic of it.
And have you further observed, that those who have a natural talent for calculation are generally quick at every other kind of knowledge; and even the dull if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they would otherwise have been.

Very true, he said.
And indeed, you will not easily find a more difficult study, and not many as difficult.

You will not.
And, for all these reasons, arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.

I agree.
Let this then be made one of our subjects of education. And next, shall we enquire whether the kindred science also concerns us?

You mean geometry?
Exactly so.
Clearly, he said, we are concerned with that part of geometry which relates to war; for in pitching a camp, or taking up a position, or closing or extending the lines of an army, or any other military manoeuvre, whether in actual battle or on a march, it will make all the difference whether a general is or is not a geometrician.

Yes, I said, but for that purpose a very little of either geometry or calculation will be enough; the question relates rather to the greater and more advanced part of geometry --whether that tends in any degree to make more easy the vision of the idea of good; and thither, as I was saying, all things tend which compel the soul to turn her gaze towards that place, where is the full perfection of being, which she ought, by all means, to behold.

True, he said.
Then if geometry compels us to view being, it concerns us; if becoming only, it does not concern us?

Yes, that is what we assert.
Yet anybody who has the least acquaintance with geometry will not deny that such a conception of the science is in flat contradiction to the ordinary language of geometricians.

How so?
They have in view practice only, and are always speaking? in a narrow and ridiculous manner, of squaring and extending and applying and the like --they confuse the necessities of geometry with those of daily life; whereas knowledge is the real object of the whole science.

Certainly, he said.
Then must not a further admission be made?
What admission?
That the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught perishing and transient.

That, he replied, may be readily allowed, and is true.
Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now unhappily allowed to fall down.

Nothing will be more likely to have such an effect.
Then nothing should be more sternly laid down than that the inhabitants of your fair city should by all means learn geometry. Moreover the science has indirect effects, which are not small.

Of what kind? he said.
There are the military advantages of which you spoke, I said; and in all departments of knowledge, as experience proves, any one who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker of apprehension than one who has not.

Yes indeed, he said, there is an infinite difference between them.
Then shall we propose this as a second branch of knowledge which our youth will study?

Let us do so, he replied.
And suppose we make astronomy the third --what do you say?
I am strongly inclined to it, he said; the observation of the seasons and of months and years is as essential to the general as it is to the farmer or sailor.

I am amused, I said, at your fear of the world, which makes you guard against the appearance of insisting upon useless studies; and I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which, when by other pursuits lost and dimmed, is by these purified and re-illumined; and is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen. Now there are two classes of persons: one class of those who will agree with you and will take your words as a revelation; another class to whom they will be utterly unmeaning, and who will naturally deem them to be idle tales, for they see no sort of profit which is to be obtained from them. And therefore you had better decide at once with which of the two you are proposing to argue. You will very likely say with neither, and that your chief aim in carrying on the argument is your own improvement; at the same time you do not grudge to others any benefit which they may receive.

I think that I should prefer to carry on the argument mainly on my own behalf.

Then take a step backward, for we have gone wrong in the order of the sciences.

What was the mistake? he said.
After plane geometry, I said, we proceeded at once to solids in revolution, instead of taking solids in themselves; whereas after the second dimension the third, which is concerned with cubes and dimensions of depth, ought to have followed.

That is true, Socrates; but so little seems to be known as yet about these subjects.

Why, yes, I said, and for two reasons: --in the first place, no government patronises them; this leads to a want of energy in the pursuit of them, and they are difficult; in the second place, students cannot learn them unless they have a director. But then a director can hardly be found, and even if he could, as matters now stand, the students, who are very conceited, would not attend to him. That, however, would be otherwise if the whole State became the director of these studies and gave honour to them; then disciples would want to come, and there would be continuous and earnest search, and discoveries would be made; since even now, disregarded as they are by the world, and maimed of their fair proportions, and although none of their votaries can tell the use of them, still these studies force their way by their natural charm, and very likely, if they had the help of the State, they would some day emerge into light.

Yes, he said, there is a remarkable charm in them. But I do not clearly understand the change in the order. First you began with a geometry of plane surfaces?

Yes, I said.
And you placed astronomy next, and then you made a step backward?
Yes, and I have delayed you by my hurry; the ludicrous state of solid geometry, which, in natural order, should have followed, made me pass over this branch and go on to astronomy, or motion of solids.

True, he said.
Then assuming that the science now omitted would come into existence if encouraged by the State, let us go on to astronomy, which will be fourth.

The right order, he replied. And now, Socrates, as you rebuked the vulgar manner in which I praised astronomy before, my praise shall be given in your own spirit. For every one, as I think, must see that astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

Every one but myself, I said; to every one else this may be clear, but not to me.

And what then would you say?
I should rather say that those who elevate astronomy into philosophy appear to me to make us look downwards and not upwards.

What do you mean? he asked.
You, I replied, have in your mind a truly sublime conception of our knowledge of the things above. And I dare say that if a person were to throw his head back and study the fretted ceiling, you would still think that his mind was the percipient, and not his eyes. And you are very likely right, and I may be a simpleton: but, in my opinion, that knowledge only which is of being and of the unseen can make the soul look upwards, and whether a man gapes at the heavens or blinks on the ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science; his soul is looking downwards, not upwards, whether his way to knowledge is by water or by land, whether he floats, or only lies on his back.

I acknowledge, he said, the justice of your rebuke. Still, I should like to ascertain how astronomy can be learned in any manner more conducive to that knowledge of which we are speaking?

I will tell you, I said: The starry heaven which we behold is wrought upon a visible ground, and therefore, although the fairest and most perfect of visible things, must necessarily be deemed inferior far to the true motions of absolute swiftness and absolute slowness, which are relative to each other, and carry with them that which is contained in them, in the true number and in every true figure. Now, these are to be apprehended by reason and intelligence, but not by sight.

True, he replied.
The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to that higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or pictures excellently wrought by the hand of Daedalus, or some other great artist, which we may chance to behold; any geometrician who saw them would appreciate the exquisiteness of their workmanship, but he would never dream of thinking that in them he could find the true equal or the true double, or the truth of any other proportion.

No, he replied, such an idea would be ridiculous.
And will not a true astronomer have the same feeling when he looks at the movements of the stars? Will he not think that heaven and the things in heaven are framed by the Creator of them in the most perfect manner? But he will never imagine that the proportions of night and day, or of both to the month, or of the month to the year, or of the stars to these and to one another, and any other things that are material and visible can also be eternal and subject to no deviation --that would be absurd; and it is equally absurd to take so much pains in investigating their exact truth.

I quite agree, though I never thought of this before.
Then, I said, in astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems, and let the heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right way and so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use.

That, he said, is a work infinitely beyond our present astronomers.
Yes, I said; and there are many other things which must also have a similar extension given to them, if our legislation is to be of any value. But can you tell me of any other suitable study?

No, he said, not without thinking.
Motion, I said, has many forms, and not one only; two of them are obvious enough even to wits no better than ours; and there are others, as I imagine, which may be left to wiser persons.

But where are the two?
There is a second, I said, which is the counterpart of the one already named.

And what may that be?
The second, I said, would seem relatively to the ears to be what the first is to the eyes; for I conceive that as the eyes are designed to look up at the stars, so are the ears to hear harmonious motions; and these are sister sciences --as the Pythagoreans say, and we, Glaucon, agree with them?

Yes, he replied.
But this, I said, is a laborious study, and therefore we had better go and learn of them; and they will tell us whether there are any other applications of these sciences. At the same time, we must not lose sight of our own higher object.

What is that?
There is a perfection which all knowledge ought to reach, and which our pupils ought also to attain, and not to fall short of, as I was saying that they did in astronomy. For in the science of harmony, as you probably know, the same thing happens. The teachers of harmony compare the sounds and consonances which are heard only, and their labour, like that of the astronomers, is in vain.

Yes, by heaven! he said; and 'tis as good as a play to hear them talking about their condensed notes, as they call them; they put their ears close alongside of the strings like persons catching a sound from their neighbour's wall --one set of them declaring that they distinguish an intermediate note and have found the least interval which should be the unit of measurement; the others insisting that the two sounds have passed into the same --either party setting their ears before their understanding.

You mean, I said, those gentlemen who tease and torture the strings and rack them on the pegs of the instrument: might carry on the metaphor and speak after their manner of the blows which the plectrum gives, and make accusations against the strings, both of backwardness and forwardness to sound; but this would be tedious, and therefore I will only say that these are not the men, and that I am referring to the Pythagoreans, of whom I was just now proposing to enquire about harmony. For they too are in error, like the astronomers; they investigate the numbers of the harmonies which are heard, but they never attain to problems-that is to say, they never reach the natural harmonies of number, or reflect why some numbers are harmonious and others not.

That, he said, is a thing of more than mortal knowledge.
A thing, I replied, which I would rather call useful; that is, if sought after with a view to the beautiful and good; but if pursued in any other spirit, useless. Very true, he said.

Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and connection with one another, and come to be considered in their mutual affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.

I suspect so; but you are speaking, Socrates, of a vast work.
What do you mean? I said; the prelude or what? Do you not know that all this is but the prelude to the actual strain which we have to learn? For you surely would not regard the skilled mathematician as a dialectician?

Assuredly not, he said; I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

But do you imagine that men who are unable to give and take a reason will have the knowledge which we require of them?

Neither can this be supposed.
And so, Glaucon, I said, we have at last arrived at the hymn of dialectic. This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but which the faculty of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for sight, as you may remember, was imagined by us after a while to behold the real animals and stars, and last of all the sun himself. And so with dialectic; when a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible.

Exactly, he said.
Then this is the progress which you call dialectic?
True.
But the release of the prisoners from chains, and their translation from the shadows to the images and to the light, and the ascent from the underground den to the sun, while in his presence they are vainly trying to look on animals and plants and the light of the sun, but are able to perceive even with their weak eyes the images in the water (which are divine), and are the shadows of true existence (not shadows of images cast by a light of fire, which compared with the sun is only an image) --this power of elevating the highest principle in the soul to the contemplation of that which is best in existence, with which we may compare the raising of that faculty which is the very light of the body to the sight of that which is brightest in the material and visible world --this power is given, as I was saying, by all that study and pursuit of the arts which has been described.

I agree in what you are saying, he replied, which may be hard to believe, yet, from another point of view, is harder still to deny. This, however, is not a theme to be treated of in passing only, but will have to be discussed again and again. And so, whether our conclusion be true or false, let us assume all this, and proceed at once from the prelude or preamble to the chief strain, and describe that in like manner. Say, then, what is the nature and what are the divisions of dialectic, and what are the paths which lead thither; for these paths will also lead to our final rest?

Dear Glaucon, I said, you will not be able to follow me here, though I would do my best, and you should behold not an image only but the absolute truth, according to my notion. Whether what I told you would or would not have been a reality I cannot venture to say; but you would have seen something like reality; of that I am confident.

Doubtless, he replied.
But I must also remind you, that the power of dialectic alone can reveal this, and only to one who is a disciple of the previous sciences.

Of that assertion you may be as confident as of the last.
And assuredly no one will argue that there is any other method of comprehending by any regular process all true existence or of ascertaining what each thing is in its own nature; for the arts in general are concerned with the desires or opinions of men, or are cultivated with a view to production and construction, or for the preservation of such productions and constructions; and as to the mathematical sciences which, as we were saying, have some apprehension of true being --geometry and the like --they only dream about being, but never can they behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses which they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account of them. For when a man knows not his own first principle, and when the conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a fabric of convention can ever become science?

Impossible, he said.
Then dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first principle and is the only science which does away with hypotheses in order to make her ground secure; the eye of the soul, which is literally buried in an outlandish slough, is by her gentle aid lifted upwards; and she uses as handmaids and helpers in the work of conversion, the sciences which we have been discussing. Custom terms them sciences, but they ought to have some other name, implying greater clearness than opinion and less clearness than science: and this, in our previous sketch, was called understanding. But why should we dispute about names when we have realities of such importance to consider?

Why indeed, he said, when any name will do which expresses the thought of the mind with clearness?

At any rate, we are satisfied, as before, to have four divisions; two for intellect and two for opinion, and to call the first division science, the second understanding, the third belief, and the fourth perception of shadows, opinion being concerned with becoming, and intellect with being; and so to make a proportion: --

As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion.
And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief, and understanding to the perception of shadows. But let us defer the further correlation and subdivision of the subjects of opinion and of intellect, for it will be a long enquiry, many times longer than this has been.

As far as I understand, he said, I agree.
And do you also agree, I said, in describing the dialectician as one who attains a conception of the essence of each thing? And he who does not possess and is therefore unable to impart this conception, in whatever degree he fails, may in that degree also be said to fail in intelligence? Will you admit so much?

Yes, he said; how can I deny it?
And you would say the same of the conception of the good?
Until the person is able to abstract and define rationally the idea of good, and unless he can run the gauntlet of all objections, and is ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but to absolute truth, never faltering at any step of the argument --unless he can do all this, you would say that he knows neither the idea of good nor any other good; he apprehends only a shadow, if anything at all, which is given by opinion and not by science; --dreaming and slumbering in this life, before he is well awake here, he arrives at the world below, and has his final quietus.

In all that I should most certainly agree with you.
And surely you would not have the children of your ideal State, whom you are nurturing and educating --if the ideal ever becomes a reality --you would not allow the future rulers to be like posts, having no reason in them, and yet to be set in authority over the highest matters?

Certainly not.
Then you will make a law that they shall have such an education as will enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering questions?

Yes, he said, you and I together will make it.
Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences, and is set over them; no other science can be placed higher --the nature of knowledge can no further go?

I agree, he said.
But to whom we are to assign these studies, and in what way they are to be assigned, are questions which remain to be considered?

Yes, clearly.
You remember, I said, how the rulers were chosen before?
Certainly, he said.
The same natures must still be chosen, and the preference again given to the surest and the bravest, and, if possible, to the fairest; and, having noble and generous tempers, they should also have the natural gifts which will facilitate their education.

And what are these?
Such gifts as keenness and ready powers of acquisition; for the mind more often faints from the severity of study than from the severity of gymnastics: the toil is more entirely the mind's own, and is not shared with the body.

Very true, he replied.
Further, he of whom we are in search should have a good memory, and be an unwearied solid man who is a lover of labour in any line; or he will never be able to endure the great amount of bodily exercise and to go through all the intellectual discipline and study which we require of him.

Certainly, he said; he must have natural gifts.
The mistake at present is, that those who study philosophy have no vocation, and this, as I was before saying, is the reason why she has fallen into disrepute: her true sons should take her by the hand and not bastards.

What do you mean?
In the first place, her votary should not have a lame or halting industry --I mean, that he should not be half industrious and half idle: as, for example, when a man is a lover of gymnastic and hunting, and all other bodily exercises, but a hater rather than a lover of the labour of learning or listening or enquiring. Or the occupation to which he devotes himself may be of an opposite kind, and he may have the other sort of lameness.

Certainly, he said.
And as to truth, I said, is not a soul equally to be deemed halt and lame which hates voluntary falsehood and is extremely indignant at herself and others when they tell lies, but is patient of involuntary falsehood, and does not mind wallowing like a swinish beast in the mire of ignorance, and has no shame at being detected?

To be sure.
And, again, in respect of temperance, courage, magnificence, and every other virtue, should we not carefully distinguish between the true son and the bastard? for where there is no discernment of such qualities States and individuals unconsciously err and the State makes a ruler, and the individual a friend, of one who, being defective in some part of virtue, is in a figure lame or a bastard.

That is very true, he said.
All these things, then, will have to be carefully considered by us; and if only those whom we introduce to this vast system of education and training are sound in body and mind, justice herself will have nothing to say against us, and we shall be the saviours of the constitution and of the State; but, if our pupils are men of another stamp, the reverse will happen, and we shall pour a still greater flood of ridicule on philosophy than she has to endure at present.

That would not be creditable.
Certainly not, I said; and yet perhaps, in thus turning jest into earnest I am equally ridiculous.

In what respect?
I had forgotten, I said, that we were not serious, and spoke with too much excitement. For when I saw philosophy so undeservedly trampled under foot of men I could not help feeling a sort of indignation at the authors of her disgrace: and my anger made me too vehement.

Indeed! I was listening, and did not think so.
But I, who am the speaker, felt that I was. And now let me remind you that, although in our former selection we chose old men, we must not do so in this. Solon was under a delusion when he said that a man when he grows old may learn many things --for he can no more learn much than he can run much; youth is the time for any extraordinary toil.

Of course.
And, therefore, calculation and geometry and all the other elements of instruction, which are a preparation for dialectic, should be presented to the mind in childhood; not, however, under any notion of forcing our system of education.

Why not?
Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Very true.
Then, my good friend, I said, do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

That is a very rational notion, he said.
Do you remember that the children, too, were to be taken to see the battle on horseback; and that if there were no danger they were to be brought close up and, like young hounds, have a taste of blood given them?

Yes, I remember.
The same practice may be followed, I said, in all these things --labours, lessons, dangers --and he who is most at home in all of them ought to be enrolled in a select number.

At what age?
At the age when the necessary gymnastics are over: the period whether of two or three years which passes in this sort of training is useless for any other purpose; for sleep and exercise are unpropitious to learning; and the trial of who is first in gymnastic exercises is one of the most important tests to which our youth are subjected.

Certainly, he replied.
After that time those who are selected from the class of twenty years old will be promoted to higher honour, and the sciences which they learned without any order in their early education will now be brought together, and they will be able to see the natural relationship of them to one another and to true being.

Yes, he said, that is the only kind of knowledge which takes lasting root.

Yes, I said; and the capacity for such knowledge is the great criterion of dialectical talent: the comprehensive mind is always the dialectical.

I agree with you, he said.
These, I said, are the points which you must consider; and those who have most of this comprehension, and who are more steadfast in their learning, and in their military and other appointed duties, when they have arrived at the age of thirty have to be chosen by you out of the select class, and elevated to higher honour; and you will have to prove them by the help of dialectic, in order to learn which of them is able to give up the use of sight and the other senses, and in company with truth to attain absolute being: And here, my friend, great caution is required.

Why great caution?
Do you not remark, I said, how great is the evil which dialectic has introduced?

What evil? he said.
The students of the art are filled with lawlessness.
Quite true, he said.
Do you think that there is anything so very unnatural or inexcusable in their case? or will you make allowance for them?

In what way make allowance?
I want you, I said, by way of parallel, to imagine a supposititious son who is brought up in great wealth; he is one of a great and numerous family, and has many flatterers. When he grows up to manhood, he learns that his alleged are not his real parents; but who the real are he is unable to discover. Can you guess how he will be likely to behave towards his flatterers and his supposed parents, first of all during the period when he is ignorant of the false relation, and then again when he knows? Or shall I guess for you?

If you please.
Then I should say, that while he is ignorant of the truth he will be likely to honour his father and his mother and his supposed relations more than the flatterers; he will be less inclined to neglect them when in need, or to do or say anything against them; and he will be less willing to disobey them in any important matter.

He will.
But when he has made the discovery, I should imagine that he would diminish his honour and regard for them, and would become more devoted to the flatterers; their influence over him would greatly increase; he would now live after their ways, and openly associate with them, and, unless he were of an unusually good disposition, he would trouble himself no more about his supposed parents or other relations.

Well, all that is very probable. But how is the image applicable to the disciples of philosophy?

In this way: you know that there are certain principles about justice and honour, which were taught us in childhood, and under their parental authority we have been brought up, obeying and honouring them.

That is true.
There are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and attract the soul, but do not influence those of us who have any sense of right, and they continue to obey and honour the maxims of their fathers.

True.
Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what is fair or honourable, and he answers as the legislator has taught him, and then arguments many and diverse refute his words, until he is driven into believing that nothing is honourable any more than dishonourable, or just and good any more than the reverse, and so of all the notions which he most valued, do you think that he will still honour and obey them as before?

Impossible.
And when he ceases to think them honourable and natural as heretofore, and he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any life other than that which flatters his desires?

He cannot.
And from being a keeper of the law he is converted into a breaker of it?

Unquestionably.
Now all this is very natural in students of philosophy such as I have described, and also, as I was just now saying, most excusable.

Yes, he said; and, I may add, pitiable.
Therefore, that your feelings may not be moved to pity about our citizens who are now thirty years of age, every care must be taken in introducing them to dialectic.

Certainly.
There is a danger lest they should taste the dear delight too early; for youngsters, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; like puppy-dogs, they rejoice in pulling and tearing at all who come near them.

Yes, he said, there is nothing which they like better.
And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything which they believed before, and hence, not only they, but philosophy and all that relates to it is apt to have a bad name with the rest of the world.

Too true, he said.
But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of such insanity; he will imitate the dialectician who is seeking for truth, and not the eristic, who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the greater moderation of his character will increase instead of diminishing the honour of the pursuit.

Very true, he said.
And did we not make special provision for this, when we said that the disciples of philosophy were to be orderly and steadfast, not, as now, any chance aspirant or intruder?

Very true.
Suppose, I said, the study of philosophy to take the place of gymnastics and to be continued diligently and earnestly and exclusively for twice the number of years which were passed in bodily exercise --will that be enough?

Would you say six or four years? he asked.
Say five years, I replied; at the end of the time they must be sent down again into the den and compelled to hold any military or other office which young men are qualified to hold: in this way they will get their experience of life, and there will be an opportunity of trying whether, when they are drawn all manner of ways by temptation, they will stand firm or flinch.

And how long is this stage of their lives to last?
Fifteen years, I answered; and when they have reached fifty years of age, then let those who still survive and have distinguished themselves in every action of their lives and in every branch of knowledge come at last to their consummation; the time has now arrived at which they must raise the eye of the soul to the universal light which lightens all things, and behold the absolute good; for that is the, pattern according to which they are to order the State and the lives of individuals, and the remainder of their own lives also; making philosophy their chief pursuit, but, when their turn comes, toiling also at politics and ruling for the public good, not as though they were performing some heroic action, but simply as a matter of duty; and when they have brought up in each generation others like themselves and left them in their place to be governors of the State, then they will depart to the Islands of the Blest and dwell there; and the city will give them public memorials and sacrifices and honour them, if the Pythian oracle consent, as demi-gods, but if not, as in any case blessed and divine.

You are a sculptor, Socrates, and have made statues of our governors faultless in beauty.

Yes, I said, Glaucon, and of our governesses too; for you must not suppose that what I have been saying applies to men only and not to women as far as their natures can go.

There you are right, he said, since we have made them to share in all things like the men.

Well, I said, and you would agree (would you not?) that what has been said about the State and the government is not a mere dream, and although difficult not impossible, but only possible in the way which has been supposed; that is to say, when the true philosopher kings are born in a State, one or more of them, despising the honours of this present world which they deem mean and worthless, esteeming above all things right and the honour that springs from right, and regarding justice as the greatest and most necessary of all things, whose ministers they are, and whose principles will be exalted by them when they set in order their own city?

How will they proceed?
They will begin by sending out into the country all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old, and will take possession of their children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws, I mean in the laws which we have given them: and in this way the State and constitution of which we were speaking will soonest and most easily attain happiness, and the nation which has such a constitution will gain most.

Yes, that will be the best way. And I think, Socrates, that you have very well described how, if ever, such a constitution might come into being.

Enough then of the perfect State, and of the man who bears its image --there is no difficulty in seeing how we shall describe him.

There is no difficulty, he replied; and I agree with you in thinking that nothing more need be said.

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Plato - The Republic (Book 7: The Allegory of the Cave)

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Glaucon] To be sure, he said. [Socrates] And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the cave, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous?

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Why Cypher Made the Right Choice in The Matrix According to Joe Pantoliano

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The Matrix is now back on everybody's radar thanks to the upcoming sequel, and with that brings fouth the questions that have plagued all of our minds ever since we first gazed into the artificial world way back in 1999.

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Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is?

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Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is ... or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us.

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave - Alex Gendler

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Plato's Allegory of the Cave — A Storyteller's Guide to Using Allegory

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The Twilight Zone (Classic): Walking Distance - Try Looking Ahead

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Visual Impact Systems - Advertising and Marketing

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Neo has this book in his apartment and uses it to hide illegal hacking stuff

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Neo has this book in his apartment and uses it to hide illegal hacking stuff

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Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation

One of the most overt philosophical references occurs near the beginning of The Matrix when Neo stashes his illegal software inside a hollowed-out copy of a book by French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard entitled Simulacra and Simulation. Originally published in 1981, Baudrillard’s book argues that late-twentieth-century consumer culture is a world in which simulations or imitations of reality have become more real than reality itself, a condition he describes as the “hyper-real.” For example, walking and running are not nearly as important as they were in premodern societies, but jogging is a recreational pastime, replete with special shoes, clothes, books, and other gear. To take another example, we no longer live in communities where food is produced locally and whole grains are a necessary dietary staple, but we have health food that enables us to replicate the experience of a peasant’s diet. (Admittedly, terms such as “jogging” and “health food” show that the book is somewhat dated, but the point still holds.)

Baudrillard argues that consumer culture has evolved from a state in which we are surrounded by representations or imitations of things that really exist, toward a state in which our lives are filled with simulations, objects that look as if they represent something else but have really created the reality they seem to refer to. In such a situation, the world of simulations increasingly takes on a life of its own, and reality itself erodes to the point that it becomes a desert. Morpheus introduces Neo to the real world by welcoming him to “the desert of the real,” a phrase taken from the first page of Simulacra and Simulation. Thus, the entire concept of the Matrix films can be interpreted as a criticism of the unreal consumer culture we live in, a culture that may be distracting us from the reality that we are being exploited by someone or something, just as the machines exploit the humans in the Matrix for bioelectricity.

Baudrillard’s greatest philosophical influence is Karl Marx, and while the Matrix films do not refer to Marx explicitly, the fact that the inhabitants of the Matrix are exploited by means of an illusion that they all inhabit renders the films closer in spirit to Marx than to any other philosopher. Marx argued that the working class is exploited by the ruling classes, but the working class’s exploitation is only possible because it does not perceive itself as being exploited. The working class misunderstands its own position because it is confused and distracted by social messages that give workers a distorted explanation of how they fit into the world—for example, religion, school, and ideologies such as nationalism and patriotism. (According to Baudrillard, consumer culture is what misleads us.) Marx’s partner, Friedrich Engels, coined the term false consciousness to describe the working class’s ignorance. Of course, the argument that average people are ignorant of their own best interests and exploited by rulers who create and capitalize on that ignorance is still common today. The documentary films of Michael Moore, for example, have sought to demonstrate that politicians and the news media exploit Americans’ fears of violence and terrorism to distract us from our true economic and political best interests. Nevertheless, the original source of all such “false consciousness” arguments, including that of the Matrix trilogy, is Marx.

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Ethan Russell hit the nail on the head. The Matrix trilogy is to Baudrillard as The Big Lebowski is to Taoism. It's just an entertaining story to descEthan Russell hit the nail on the head. The Matrix trilogy is to Baudrillard as The Big Lebowski is to Taoism. It's just an entertaining story to describe something very complex in laymen's terms. Baudrillard doesn't even assume a place where reality exists, since the hyperreal has supplanted it. But the hyperreal itself is just "nexus of symbols" that pretend to reference the reality they falsely claim to represent. In other words, the true "reality" in the Matrix doesn't even exist to Baudrillard. Where the Matrix makes the claim that the real world and the virtual world both "exist", Baudrillard claims that the "real world" has been completely lost and the virtual (i.e. the "map") is all that remains. Luke Connors...more (less)

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Trevor (I sometimes get notified of comments)

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Ethan Russell hit the nail on the head. The Matrix trilogy is to Baudrillard as The Big Lebowski is to Taoism. It's just an entertaining story to descEthan Russell hit the nail on the head. The Matrix trilogy is to Baudrillard as The Big Lebowski is to Taoism.

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The Matrix Trilogy Faiths and Religions Summary & Analysis | SparkNotes

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A summary of Part X (Section3) in The Wachowskis’s The Matrix Trilogy. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of The Matrix Trilogy and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.